Painting with Pinecones!

A few weeks ago the kids picked up every pinecone they could find at the park near our house. I'm watching them having tons of fun finding them all and wondering what the heck to do with all these pinecones...I finally hit on painting with them! Something new and something fun! We even did the painting outside which was a huge novelty- something we've never done before! The kids were so excited when they woke up from their naps and I told them we were going to paint outside with our pinecones. They wanted to get their other nature collections (nature collections are sort of their thing these days, not sure where that came from, but they love to go outside with their bags and just collect stuff! It's fun to see what "treasures" they find!) and paint with those, too- those "helicopters" from trees, leaves, sticks, rocks, etc. So we had fun painting outside for a while; they were strangely quiet for this activity, but I think it was just so novel and so different that they were so entranced, so interested, and so busy thinking that they were just quiet. In any case, we had fun! Hopefully we can do some more painting outside this summer!