Toddler activity: painting cardboard

Age range: 19 months to I'll let you know when Boo loses interest
Setup difficulty: Easy.
Equipment needed: Toddler friendly paint brush(es), paint, containers for the paint, cardboard to paint, optional: protection for clothing and a splat mat.

Boo loves to paint. We do a lot of  basic painting, you know the old fashioned kind, involving brushes, paint and paper. But every now and then I like to mix it up. How did cardboard painting come about? I bought some glass dishes and the box they came in had this weird shaped piece of cardboard in it to protect the glass (you'll see pictures of this below). Not only did it look like the terrain from a war themed video game, it also had an interesting texture. I knew right then that it deserved a better fate than an immediate dump into the recycling bin. A few days later Boo said "paint, paint" and as I set up for the activity, there was our weird piece of cardboard, just begging to be made pretty. We grabbed it and voila, a new art form was born.

Setup

Ideally, toddlers should paint with no clothes on. If the weather or mosquitos or whatever make this impossible, you'll need something to protect their clothes. I love these full coverage bibs from Ikea. They are cheap, full sleeved, super easy to put on and take just a few seconds to rinse off in the sink.

We use Melissa & Doug's jumbo paint brushes. Boo seems to like the chubby handles, she finds them easy to hold and control. She also gets a kick out of picking a brush of a particular colour (they have coloured handles) and, perhaps more importantly, picking which colour I should use. At the ripe old age of getting close to two Boo tends not to put everything in her mouth any more, so I've graduated to store bought paints. We're currently using Crayola washable finger paints.

I squirt a blob of paint into a plastic cup - one cup for each colour. The paints we're using are thick, so if she does knock a cup over, I typically get to it long before it spills. Boo tends to be careful with her paints though, she will move the paint cups to a different location with great deliberation if they start to knock against her arm.

Play!

Here is Boo at work on the Weird But Awesome piece of cardboard.

She found the surface more interesting and challenging than regular paper, and we 'used up' only about a third of it in one sitting. I liked the fact that she not only got to do what she loves, but she also had to do a bit of problem solving along the way. She figured out how to hold her brush differently while painting horizontal and vertical surfaces and learning how to properly aim her brush (to get into a particular nook or cranny) was good practice for her motor skills.