Blogger / 2 June, 2025 / Nanny Anita

Painting Rocks With Water

There are many things that you can do to help children with learning to write.  There are the activities that will help develop fine motor skills and hand muscles that will help them write.  Then there are the ones that start to help develop the concept of making marks with instruments.  If you give a small child a writing instrument, they wont instinctively use it to draw with.  They will probably stick it in their mouth.  Which is exactly what happened when we were away and someone at a restaurant gave NC some crayons.  I will say I wasn’t there when it happened, I came in while they were trying scoop crayon out of her mouth.  This painting rocks with water is a taste safe starter activity for toddlers before moving onto things like paint.

Make sure you follow my activities to do with toddlers board on Pinterest for more ideas.  Don’t forget to save the pin for later.

To do your own painting rocks with water activity you will need:

• A tray
• Bowl of water
• Toddler friendly paintbrush*
• Large rocks**

*I used some my first paint brush set by Honeysticks.  They have nice chubby wooden handles that are made from natural wood and are non-toxic.

**you need ones that are going to be far too big to put in their mouths.  I would also recommend washing them beforehand.

Set up your tray with the rocks, bowl of water, and brushes.  We did ours outside because it was such a lovely day.

To begin with I let her explore all the equipment, and of course the paintbrush when straight to her mouth.  While she was exploring, I simply started dipping one of the brushes into the water and then started painting a rock.  It didn’t take NC too long to start copying my actions.  She did start by putting the brush in the water handle first but eventually managed to do it the right way up.

We were outside for about an hour, and she kept coming back to do this between playing with other things.  It is definitely an activity I will be bring out again.

If you enjoyed this painting rocks with water activity, be sure to check out my taste safe paint and pom pom blowing activity.

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