Painting on a Rug

As a teacher I'm an avid recycler. I don't know of any program that has infinite money for materials, so what usually happens is we find materials and reperpose them in fun ways.
Recently a co-worker of mine brought in different pieces of flooring. She brought us some vynil, and big pieces of carpet. I love to paint on big pieces of paper, as I explained in my previous post. I thought about what if we put paint on it. The carpet would absorb the paint as they mushed it around. That sounded like too much fun to pass up.
So knowing this would probably be a whole body painting project, we decided to save the parents laundry and forwent clothing. They needed no introduction to the concept and jumped right in.

They all started with sitting down and putting their hands on the pain and maybe squishing their feet around in it.

Then they got up and danced over the carpet. One group decided that running over the carpet was enough and after they were done with that decided they were done painting.

The other group took a more full body approach to painting. They did summer salts across the carpet. Tried to paint with their hair. Rolled around in the paint. The carpet was great for all of this, because it was soft, and also it absorbed a lot of the paint, so less got on the kids themselves, though there was plenty to still get messy in.

At one point they found a pumpkin left over from a project a few weeks back and decided to have that go rolling over the paint to see what would happen. Some how no paint got onto that pumpkin.

We had a blast, even with clean up being as it was. I basically got to give each child a bath to get off the excess paint.
The two pieces are now up in our hallway on the wall. So they can touch their artwork and revisit it everyday. I hung up papers for parents and children to comment on the project, we will see what response we get. This is definitely a project that is going down in my history book!
Thanks so much for reading.
Remember, Have Fun!