Painted Pebbles – craft & activities

8th February 2018 Kids

Painted pebbles really are as simple as they sound: find some pebbles and paint them. Although the principle is simple, the possibilities are endless. The Bear is almost at pre-school age (starts in September….eeek!) and we’re currently working on the alphabet. More specifically her name so she can spell and recognise it when the time comes to going to school. Therefore, I wanted to decorate some stones so we could start working on that.

WHAT YOU NEED

You don’t need a lot to do this craft, literally two things: pebbles and pens. That’s it.

The pebbles: I knew I wanted to do this for a while now so we took our time hunted around for the flat kind that are usually perfect for skimming on a pond. This is so they are easy to decorate (for me) and easy to line up and spell with (for the Bear). How many you need will depend on what you want to spell.

The pens: you can use sharpies for this but I don’t find the colours bright enough for my liking. Therefore, I used these Porcelain Pens  (affiliate link) from my craft stash. There are loads on the market but these are the ones I personally use. It seems that not only are they great for decorating Christmas Plates with, but they are also good for painted pebbles as the colour lasts and stays bright.

WHAT WE DID

Now, you have two choices when it comes to painting your pebbles: you can do it with your child, or if they are a little young then you can decorate them yourself and just share the end result. I chose the latter as Henry would no doubt want to get involved too and at 18 months I didn’t want him using these pens seeing as there’s nothing washable about them!

For us, all I did was spell out their names and brighten each stone with a ring of coloured spots. Simple but effective.

However, I didn’t stop there as I also wanted to give us more options. So, on the other side of the letters spelling their names, I added in numbers from 1 – 5 and a few coloured shapes too. This is not only to give us a few more options as to how we play with them, but also to make it a little more difficult when looking for a specific letter, shape or number (as they need to look on both sides).

And there we have it, painted pebbles. I love this craft – as you can see it’s so quick and easy to do, but so effective and has great learning potentially for little ones.

ACTIVITY IDEAS

• Spell out words – you spell a word and they have to find the pebbles to spell it too.
• Mixing colours – decorate stones with all the colours on the spectrum and ask your child to add them together like a sum. For example; yellow + blue = green.
• Find a shape – ask them to find a particular shape on a pebble. Make it one step harder by asking them to also find the number which tells you how many sides that shape has. For example: blue square + 4 sides.
• Sequence copying – draw a list of numbers, shapes and letters on a piece of paper and ask your child to find the pebbles to copy that sequence.

My next step with this is that I want to keep looking for more pebbles similar to these so I can create a whole alphabet ready for spelling homework when the time comes. I’d also complete the numbers and add in all the maths symbols ready to start with sums.

What about you and your children? What would you use your stones for?

For more craft ideas, then check out our kids creations section.