Sadly, we are home from our vacation at the beach.  Unfortunately, young children don’t take a few days to get back into the swing of things — they start right at 60mph the first day they’re back!  It’s been a bit rainy since we got home, so we’ve had to find some fun indoor activities to keep us busy.  Both L and N enjoyed playing with seashells while we were at the beach, so I decided to figure out how to use them now that we’re home.  L needed to get messy [AHHHH!], so I decided we would try painting with the seashells.

I put some different-shaped seashells into a bowl beside a piece of paper and two paper plates with paint on them [easy clean-up — just throw the plates away!].  We first held each seashell and talked about how it felt — its textures, size, and shape.

I showed L how to press a shell into the paint and then press it like a stamp onto the paper.  We looked at the different patterns each shell made.  We were able to roll some of them to get really cool patterns all over the paper.

This was a great sensorial activity for L, and the end result was even cooler than I expected!  We are slowly branching out into painting with materials other than just paintbrushes, so painting with seashells was very exciting for L.  I rinsed off the shells so we can do this again soon.