Making and Painting a Textured Surface

This started out as a great OT activity. Take toilet paper and let the children rip it into little bits and fill a bowl with it. They absolutely loved that part.

Then you add glue. Lots of glue. I didn't measure, but I used at least 8 oz for the three bowls. Ask the children to mix the glue with the toilet paper (with their hands) until it turns to sticky mush. Listen to screaming and crying protests and end up doing much of the mixing yourself. (Or at least, that's how it went at our house.)

[I forgot to take a picture of what the glue/toilet paper mush looked like. Sorry!]

Then persuade the children to take the mush from the bowl and put it on paper to dry creating textured paper before they run off to wash their hands. If you have children with no sensory issues, this has so much potential. I made a snowman. You could make a mountain and lake. You could make anything really. It's pretty cool.

Let it dry for a couple of days until you remember to get back to the project.

Let the children paint the newly textured paper. They loved this part. I filled an ice cube tray with six different colors of liquid tempera paints and gave them brushes and let them paint. We experimented with dabbing it on the textured areas and different types of brush strokes on the plain paper. They had a blast. We spent about 45 minutes painting the textured paper and then moving on to several other pieces of plain paper before they were done.

Here's how the painted textured ones turned out.

A couple of notes should you decide to try this activity yourself. You need lots of glue. And lots of toilet paper. We used about half a roll of toilet paper and ended up with relatively little final product.