Toddler Art Activity: Wiffle Ball Painting

I did it! I finally did it! I let Kellan paint today. I've been wanting to try wiffle ball painting with him. I wasn't sure how it would go because the second he sees a ball he THROWS it. And I was a little nervous about him throwing the ball with paint all over it. I ended up using smaller golf wiffle balls and a plastic toy golf ball because I couldn't find our regular sized wiffle balls.

Here's what we ended up with at the end of the project. :-)

He played with the paint bottles a bit when we first got them out.

He got mad at me when I took his clothes off. I'm not sure what that was about. He might have thought I was changing him to take him somewhere because he was still in his pajamas. And maybe he got mad because he thought I was going to take him away from the fun project.

I started off by putting two splats of paint on the paper and put the balls in the box. I picked up the box and shook it around to show Kellan what he could do. He shook the box a little and then stuck his hand in the paint. He didn't like having it on his hands very much. So I wiped them off and gave him a brush and he was much happier. This sort of surprised me. I really thought he would get into finger painting.

 

He kept asking for more splats of paint. He would point to which color he wanted and I would tell him the color and he would gesture for me to put it on the paper. Every now and then, we rolled the balls around. He batted them around with the brush.

 

Eventually, he got over his issue with having his hands messy. :-) He actually did amazingly well with this activity. I was really surprised he didn't throw the balls, he kept them in the box. And it was fun to watch him create with the paint. He really only got his hands and the table messy so that's not too bad at all. I was planning on giving him a bath this afternoon anyway, so clean up was easy. I'm really glad I finally did something messy with him and that it went much better than my expectations!