Once in a while we get around to doing art projects.
Since we like picture books, these art projects occasionally pair up with picture books.
We’ve been reading about ocean animals recently, so we decided to paint a sea star. For this project, we used play dough to create stamps.
Check out the instructions and picture book recommendations below!
This is a messy project. Be sure kids are dressed for finger paints or wear smocks. This is also a good project for using up older tubs of play dough. Since the play dough gets coated in paint, you can use those old mixed-up, dried-out colors.
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If you want to avoid shopping on Amazon, I suggest checking Bookshop or your local bookstores instead.
Book Recommendation:
Star of the Sea: A Day in the Life of a Starfish by Janet Halfmann, illustrated by Joan Paley. In this story, the starfish loses one of its rays to a seagull. That’s not a big deal for a sea star, though! They can recover and regrow their missing rays.
Sea stars are also a relatively simple shape for kids to make. They have five nearly matching legs. So, kids can create one stamp and use it to create all five legs.
If you want, you can even use this project to talk about radial symmetry with older kids. (See more about that below.)
Supplies: old play dough scraps, finger paints, and paper.
When I started working on this project, I tried creating some actual stamps. Since I was planning an ocean-theme, I started with starfish and octopus shapes. Those seemed like nice, simple shapes that would work well as stamps.
As you can see, though, from this first picture, play dough stamps don’t really work for detailed shapes. The surface is irregular, so it’s hard for kids to get the whole shape to show up on the paper.
However, play dough is fantastic when it comes to creating semi-abstract textures!
So, don’t worry about creating the entire sea star. Instead, focus on breaking the play dough up into a variety of round, flat, or tube shapes. Then you can use those like a paint brush to create different textures.
Thin or tube shaped pieces can paint long blades of undersea grass.
Roundish blobs can build a great rock texture. Use heavier paint in some areas to show the darker textures of shadows.
Radial symmetry
This is a big concept, but it’s relatively easy to show with a stamp.
Start by explaining that people have two arms, two legs, two eyes–one on each side of our body. Many other animals are the same, but sea stars have arms in a circle instead.
Sea stars have radial symmetry. That means that their body parts spread out like the rays of a sun, instead of growing side-by-side.
Sea stars also have a very simple body shape–each arm is a long, roundish triangle that’s repeated around the circle.
What does this look like? Roll a simple triangle shape out of play dough. Then use this shape to stamp the paint five times in a circle. This creates the five rays of a sea star.
Ask kids to notice the repetition in these shapes. This is the radial symmetry in a sea star’s body.
Once they’ve had time to talk about this idea, encourage them to create their own sea stars. Kids can also fill in the background with blue and brown rock shapes, using stamps to create different textures.
Get Creative!
See what other radial shapes you can come up with! When I did this activity, my kids were younger, so we kept the stamps fairly simple. Older kids can experiment with other shapes or use tools to add more details and textures to the stamps.
I’d love to see what you create, if you want to tag me on Instagram at @kidlitandsteam.
P.S. If you like this activity, be sure to check out my science-themed coloring & activity book, Shrimp, Shrimp, Cuttlefish!
This book focuses on more than 30 ocean animals with coloring pages and activities like the one in this post. You can find a sample coloring page from the book here.
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