Monday 22 September 2014

Activity Corner - Conker Rolling

On Monday, it was a beautiful Autumnal morning, and daddy had the day off so when we had dropped Harrison off at nursery, we took Alex to the park to play on the swings and walked home through the cemetery.
Our local cemetery is huge, and is a beautiful and peaceful place for a quiet walk. In Autumn, it is absolutely beautiful, with all the trees changing colour and the floor covered in the brightly coloured leaves. It is also the perfect place to collect conkers and pine cones.
Last year we used our conkers in a sensory bin along with some leaves, cones and sticks. This year I wanted to use them in an art activity, and so we did some conker rolling!
To do this you need:


Some conkers

A tray with edges
Paint
Paper cut to fit the tray
 Put the paper into the tray (if it is slightly smaller than the tray, sellotape it down to stop it moving about) and squeeze some blobs of paint onto the paper. We chose to use some autumn colours – reds, greens, browns, yellows and oranges, but you could use whatever colours you wanted. Drop the conkers in and roll them around!


The conkers move through the paint and create some lovely patterns. We had fun rolling and shaking the trays to see what effects we could create. It was also the perfect opportunity to talk about colour mixing – what would happen when the red and yellow paint was mixed up? We used brown paper in one of our trays and white in the other to see the different looks.


We used quite a lot of paint, which created a lovely marbled effect. It would be interesting to see the different effects that using less paint and conkers would make – a definite activity for comparison!
The paintings can be left just as they are or cut out and used to make leaves for an Autumn picture.
This would be a lovely activity to do around Christmas with red and green paint to make special wrapping paper for small gifts. I think we will also have a go with white paint (with some sparkles) on black paper for some wonderful snowy images.
A quick and fun activity with conkers!
Rachel x 

2 comments:

  1. What a great idea, we have loads of conkers I was just going to decorate them but this sounds like so much more fun :) x

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  2. I love the idea of using this to make leaves or wrapping paper. I think we might try something like this nearer Christmas too. Would be fab with glittery paint!

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