Fun With Van Gogh

From Julie’s service:

My families are encouraged to let me know about interesting events happening in their children’s lives so I can support or extend their learning with a related fun activity.  So, when recently a family told me they planned to visit the multi-sensory van Gogh exhibition at LUME, I thought the children here could all have a bit of fun, being inspired by some of van Gogh’s famous artwork.

Some of the children’s amazing creations

One day we looked at van Gogh’s iconic Sunflowers painting, identifying the colours used. Then using pipettes, we dripped and squirted watery shades of these colours, over a Sunflower drawing.  The children experimented with dapping the excess paint away with paper towel to leave interesting blends. 

One of the children hadn’t been particularly interested to join in.  Noticing he’d been playing with toy turtles during the morning, and inspired by the turtle picture on his t-shirt, I made a drawing of the turtle for him.  Soon, he too was having fun squirting and dabbing paint!

The next day, we waited until the school-aged children joined us before we looked at van Gogh’s The Starry Night painting. Encouraging the children to use the drama, bold style and swirling brush strokes as inspiration, the children played with paint squirted thickly onto silver foil. 

Based on the chatter, laughter, and oohs and aahs when someone produced an interesting effect, it appears they all had a great time, while I in turn enjoyed watching how the preschool children’s thorough enjoyment in the feel of the paint inspired a school-aged child, who’d initially been fairly doubtful about using their hands, to give it a go.

‘This is not the type of painting I thought we’d be doing’ laughed the school-aged child, holding up their paint covered hands!

Variations on The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

Messy hands say “we had fun!”