I’ve yet to find affordable puffy paint for kids in our neck of the woods. So, we decided to make our own and surprisingly enough it was easy to whip up and super cheap compared to buying it.
Don’t you love those activities that work well with kids of all ages! My toddler absolutely loved it not to mention both my older boys, 2 and 4th graders really got into it.
We’ve been studying the earth for the past weeks in homeschool science and it just so happened to coincide with Earth Day!
Earth Day Activity: Puffy Paint Recipe & Earth Art
Homemade Puffy Paint recipe
- 1/2 of shaving cream mixture to 1/2 of liquid glue ratio, plus then some
- optional: food coloring &
- earth day printable ( this is the one we used but if you want another one just google Earth Coloring sheet)
The more glue you use, the puffier it will stay. You’ll need to play around with it until you get some what stiff peaks. We made two batches and the batch with less glue deflated a lot quicker.
In a bowl mix the shaving cream and glue. We made one batch of puffy paint (one for each color): blue and green. We made it in normal size cereal bowls and it was more than enough for all three boys to color in their earth. They even had some left over.
Then add your food coloring to the mix. We used about 5 drops of food coloring to get the color that we were going for.
Once it’s all mixed then start painting. I put out paintbrushes and popsicle sticks for spreading out their shaving cream and you can even use Q-tips.
Note, you don’t want to spread your paint out too thin, if it’s spread out thing then it won’t be puffy. My toddler has great fine motor skills so it wasn’t hard for him to stay within the “lines”, though he did go out in the thinner areas. But if it’s more challenging for your kiddos just remind them that the puffy paint will cover all the areas and they won’t be able to tell at the end.
These are some of the books we enjoyed in our lesson Magic School Bus Inside the Earth book. Since we studied landforms they enjoyed this Landforms of the Earth Video and this printable for a better understanding of landforms. For Earth Day we watched this Recycling video and this Earth Day Scavenger hunt. You can go checkout my Science and Social Studies Pinterest Board to see all of the ideas I’ve pinned.
Other super simple activities you’ll enjoy:
Earth Suncatcher Only three supply items needed.
Fruit Flower Pot Snack (semi-healthy)
Recycled Items Earth Day Scavenger Hunt
Edible Worm and Dirt Pots (not so healthy version)