Pendulum drip painting with eggs!
We began this lesson by reading the book, Little blue and little yellow by Leo Lionni. It is such a cute story about two little dots who are best friends and one day after they hug they both turn green! This story inspired us to use the colors blue and yellow to create our own pendulum paintings.
First we discussed what a pendulum is. A pendulum is made from hanging an object from something else. When you pull a pendulum to one side and let it go, it swings back and forth. Galilelo was the first to really study pendulums and he discovered that their regularity could be used for keeping time which led to the first clocks. We discussed how we would have more control over ours as we were the ones moving the egg on the string back and forth.
I then filled the plastic eggs with blue and yellow liquid water color paint and attached a string to each of the eggs. The plastic eggs that I picked up already had two small holes in each end but if not it shouldn't be too hard to add them.
The children then took turns to swing their paint filled eggs back and forth across the paper. Some held the string closer to the paper others further away.
They were having so much fun and each remarked joyfully when the two colors combined to make green dots as well!
We will be revisiting pendulum painting outside, on a larger scale when the weather warms up a bit more!
For free print outs explaining this activity to add to the students paper click here.
