For The Tots: Yummy Yogurt Fingerpainting!

My older children love to paint, and I have wanted for months to introduce Curls to finger-painting, but he is still very much in that 'taste everything' stage, so I was uneasy about letting him use any of the standard finger paint products.  No matter how non-toxic they are, I know he's going to end up eating more than he actually puts on the paper, and I didn't want to have to explain to Studly that Curls wasn't hungry because he had paint for lunch! (Yikes!)

Then I had a great idea...yogurt!  We buy big containers of yogurt during the warmer months, when we practically live off smoothies and milkshakes.  Curls just loves the stuff, and it has a great consistency that is very similar to finger paint you buy.  So I decided to go ahead and make Curls some finger paint that is actually food.

First I got some vanilla yogurt (you can use whatever flavor your toddler loves, but the white yogurts work better for the colors to come out truer) and put a few spoonfuls on a plate.

I added a drop of food coloring to each pile of yogurt and stirred it in with a toothpick until the color was thoroughly incorporated.  You can add another drop or two of coloring for a more vibrant color, but I've found that the more you add, the more it stains, so I just stick with one drop.

Then for the paper I tore open a brown paper grocery bag and cut it to the size I wanted.  The brown bags are great for toddler art for several reasons:  the thicker paper has a texture that is great for tactile exploration, it will not let the paint just 'seep' and spread like regular paper would, and its larger, which means you can catch all the art that your little one creates, instead of wiping the bulk of it off the table where they missed the paper!

After cutting the paper to a good size, I taped it to the table with some clear packing tape so that it wouldn't slide around or rip while Curls was creating his masterpiece.  Then I got my little artist to the table and gave him his yummy finger paints to try.

Of course the first thing he did was start eating it!

Eventually though, he figured out that he could put his colorful food onto the paper and spread it around.  He went back and forth between eating and finger painting for about ten minutes until he decided he was done.

Self painting is an art form too, right?

When his wonderful painting was totally dry (just took about an hour for the wettest spots) I pulled it off the table and cut off the excess paper where he didn't paint very much.  This was his second art piece and we are sending it off to his grandma and grandpa...his first is hanging on my fridge!

A Masterpiece!