Spray Painted Bats

This week at Play Group we learned a little about bats by reading Stellaluna by Janell Cannon.

Then we enjoyed an easy craft that left a dark silhouette of flying bat on our paper courtesy of Creative Tots. With only fantastic photos to work from we cut out paper bats from various types of paper and diluted some white tempera paint and made sure the setting was on "spray" rather than "stream".

Having the children spray from further away and standing rather than crouching near the paper worked best. Squeezing spray bottles is great for strengthening fine motor skills. They children may want to continue spraying, so you might want to provide spray bottles with water and take them outside to help them meet that need.

Just play around with the paint/water mixture using very little water and first and adding just enough to allow it to flow easily through the bottles straw. We could have used a little less water in our mixture/ or more white paint depending on your outlook.

For the bat template....we found one we liked on the internet and traced on various types of paper.
Paperboard and stock card paper curled almost instantly and pretty severely. Construction paper worked best.

We cut out mostly black bat templates which worked well since the bat seemed to magically appear when the cutout was removed after spraying. Also, the leftover bat cut outs happily went to their new homes with the kids to hang in window or on garland.