Our final activity inspired by Oliver Jeffers’ How To Catch A Star turned into two incredibly messy but fabulously funny activities.

I thought that they would be process arts without much of an end product

But actually the finished stars are all rather lovely

Would you like to see?

Yesterday when Esther and William got home from preschool

I was ready for them

We started with an activity that Karin from Cafe Bebe shared with me on Facebook last year

Throwing powder paint at contact paper

I ordered some Holi powder from Amazon

The colours were so vibrant

Perfect for making our sun catcher stars

I attached some sticky paper, contact paper

To our BigJigs easel

And then asked Esther and William if they would like to throw paint at it

I have never seen William so excited about an art activity

He was ready and raring to go

And he loved every minute of it

William literally just threw the paint everywhere

With gusto!

Esther threw the paint

But then smoothed and smeared it across the page

Their techniques gave very different effects on the paper

They loved working together and individually

To cover their pages in colour

Beautiful bright splodges of colour

After the paint had time to settle

I cut out the star shapes and stuck them to the window

Overlooking Baby Tilda’s garden

I did it once the children were in bed

And in the dark I was quite disappointed with our stars

But in the morning I was dazzled by our sun catchers

Our sun catcher stars

Esther and William were thrilled with their stars

The window where they catch the sun

Is where we eat breakfast every morning

Looking out at Tilda’s garden

When Esther and William had finished their paint throwing

We moved straight to our next activity

Shaving foam marbling

I thought it would be a good way to have fun

And a sneaky way to get Esther and William really clean!

For shaving foam marbling we used

Two baking trays

Two cheap cans of foam

Food colouring (we chose pink, purple, blue and green)

And we added in star stirrers too

Esther and William, particularly William, adored this activity

They got totally and utterly stuck in

Literally smothering and covering themselves in foam

It was wonderful to watch

I fell head over heels in love with my children

I drunk in their complete joy in this activity

After some initial exploration of the feel of the foam

We began to add some colour

Esther became very engaged in colour mixing and pattern making

William became engrossed in covering himself in as much foam as possible

Esther and I marbled the stars

We pressed them into the foam

And then scraped off the excess foam

To reveal the marbled pattern

We made lots and lots of stars

William mostly did this

He did make two stars

Which actually were quite stunning

With lovely streaks of blue

We put all the stars to one side

And I am going to string them together

To make Baby Tilda starry bunting

The finished stars are so very pretty

With their marbled swirls

A perfect finishing activity for our series inspired by

Oliver Jeffers’ How To Catch A Star

But our day was not quite over

Esther and William wanted to take their foam painting outside

And so we did

My lovely little girl

And my bestest boy

And we all played together and remembered our star in the sky

And the best was STILL to come

We took the foam paint up to the bath

Where Esther and William covered each other in pink and blue foaming paint

Before showering it all off

A wonderful way to end our day

And, of course, reading How To Catch A Star