Spin Art for Valentine's Day

I always enjoying trying out a new art process, and I've been wanting to try out this "spin art" process using a salad spinner for quiet awhile. Like many new processes, I tried it out on my own time first. I knew that Gorilla (3.5 years) was going to love it, because he loves to help me spin salad at dinnertime. 

He really did love it, and wanted to do it over and over again. 

So I was excited to introduce the concept to my preschool classes. 

Everyone was eager to try this out, and some kids stayed at the table for basically the whole center time, trying things out over and over again. 

These two friends wanted to work together. :) 

I think one thing that made this activity so engaging was that the students could be mostly independent in this process: 

Squeezing the paint, placing the lid, and of course, pushing the spinner up and down. 

There was always a moment of excitement and wonder when we lifted the lid to see what happened.

My salad spinner was full of festive paint!

The kids loved this so much, that we ran out of paint! So we started to reuse the paint left in the bottom of the bowl. We used this process to create valentine hearts and the base for our Valentine mailboxes, although after those things were finished many kids started cutting out their own creations to try spinning in the bowl. We will definitely have to try this again some time!

Here's a peek at our Valentine mailboxes

And here are some of the hearts we created using this process. We thought of something nice we could say about each other as a class, and wrote that down on the back as sort of a class valentine for each student.