Color Mixing Activity For Toddlers

Inside: What happens when you drive toy cars through puddles of yellow and blue paint? This color mixing activity for toddlers is all about action at the art table! Toddlers are busy, busy, busy. I can see all you parents and toddler teachers nodding! So you’ve probably noticed that they don’t like to sit for very long, preferring to be moving. This is why I love to provide art activities with action. I also love using materials that young children love. This draws them to the art table! While putting together a simple color mixing activity for toddlers, I decided to involve toy cars. What happens when you drive a car through puddles of yellow and blue paint? This is what we discovered while driving cars all around the paper!

Using What They Love

Toddlers love anything on wheels. I realized early in my teaching career that cars and trucks were probably one of the biggest hits with anything we did. That includes art! If you’ve been following my blog for awhile, you’ve seen some fun ways we’ve added cars with paint, including:

RainbowsHeartsRoads

We’ve painted with:

FiretrucksDuplo VehiclesTractorsSmall Cars

Every single time I add vehicles to the art table, even the children who don’t normally love art come running!

Fine Motor Benefits

I am often asked how we can get the hands ready for writing. Even with toddlers. My answer? Activities that get their hands and fingers moving. Especially those that offer big motions, using the entire arm and shoulder. Toddlers love the larger movements with big sheets of paper. Remove those chairs and let them walk around the table while they are driving the cars. Busy toddlers love this!

It’s All About the Process

I’ve said it many, many times, and it bears repeating. Activities that focus on the process itself rather than the final product offer many benefits for young children. I always pay attention to the actual activity and its benefits, not what the final result looks like. In fact, with this particular activity we didn’t even save it. I took a picture to send to the parents and that was it. (But you can save pieces of it to send home, if you wish. Just cut the large finished product into squares and send one home with each child.)

Toy Car Color Mixing Activity for Toddlers

CLICK HERE for more activities using toy cars! Supplies:

Butcher paper (to cover the table) OR individual large sheets of paperTape (to secure ends of butcher paper to table)Blue tempera paintYellow tempera paintToy cars

Set Up: If using one sheet of butcher paper, cut it to the size of your art table and tape the ends to the table. If using single sheets of large paper, place on table. Place toy cars on table and squirt puddles of blue and yellow paint on various parts of the paper.

Invitation to Mix Paint

Point out to your children that there is yellow and blue paint on the paper. Have them take a car and drive it through both colors, over and over again. What color are they making? Not much direction is needed with this color mixing activity. Just push and pull cars through paint, making tracks! If you are using butcher paper, encourage your children to drive all over the paper. This creates those big movements I was talking about earlier. This gets the entire arm and shoulder moving! If you have children who want to do this for quite awhile (as we did!), you might need to freshen the paint. We squirted more paint on the paper as needed. Lots of big movements as the color green is being made!