Last week, we landed in Frida Kahlo’s beautiful, colourful garden in Mexico City.  This inspired us, this week, to take our painting outside too.  Unfortunately, the weather in Raynes Park wasn’t quite as sunny and bright as it was in Mexico but, of course, we didn’t mind at all.  In fact, we love it when it starts to rain because muddy puddles have got to be one of our favourite things!

As you may remember, we particularly love to colour mix in the puddles, using sprinkles of powder paint.  However, there was so much rain this week, that the puddles were very muddy indeed and this made it difficult to see the colour changes.

So, instead, we decided to do our colour mixing in the water tray.  We always use the three primary colours (red, blue and yellow) when mixing, so the children can clearly see how to create the secondary colours (orange, green and purple).

image from Wikipedia

We also tried lots of colour mixing with paint and brushes at our outside paint station…

And we even had a go at painting with giant paintbrushes (brushes attached to broom handles!)…

Later, we used an assortment of different sized brushes to create our very own mural in the garden…

Isn’t it beautiful? Unfortunately, it didn’t last long as the wind became so strong in the afternoon, that it blew away!  Luckily, we were able to take a few photos to share with you!

All of this wonderful painting led us to our next story – The Magic Paintbrush by Julia Donaldson and Joel Stewart:

Image from www.amazon.co.uk

This is a charming story about a girl called Shen who receives a magic paintbrush.  The paintbrush can bring the items she paints to life!  You can revisit the story here:

The story of the magic paintbrush is set in China – which is the next stop on Granny’s worldwide adventure!  We were quite reluctant to leave Mexico (and actually asked to extend our stay so we could re-read our Frida story twice more!) but, eventually, we climbed back onto the magic carpet and waved goodbye to Frida and her monkey.

We flew up, up and away westwards once more, over the Pacific Ocean to China.  As we came into land, we could see lots of trees, mountains and what looked like a very long line across the landscape:

We used the orange man to help us land safely and this is what we saw:

We wondered where on earth we could be?

“It’s a bridge with water under”

“It’s a lookout”

“It’s a house”

“It’s a prison” (such a good suggestion – linked to the story we had just read, perhaps?)

“It’s a wall of China!”

What super ideas and guesses Nursery – we were so impressed!

Don’t forget to check back next week, to find out where we have landed…