The art of fruit

by Jacki Donaldson (Subscribe to Jacki Donaldson's posts)
Jun 28th 2008 7:30AM

Categories: Healthy Kids, Nutrition & Supplements

My kids love fruit. Yours might too. But it never can hurt to have a little more fruit-filled inspiration in our lives. That's what one teacher thought just before setting her kindergarten class loose on this fruity art project. Still Life With Kool-Aid is what she calls it. And here's what Jessica Burkett did.

She covered a work area with newspaper.

She heaped fruit into a bowl, even let some overflow onto the table. The more fruit there is to paint, the better, she says.

She had kids use markers to draw an outline on watercolor paper of the still life. Kids were instructed not to color anything in with the markers, though.

In separate cups, she used separate paintbrushes and mixed each of five packets of unsweetened Kool-Aid with two tablespoons of water. She arranged the cups in a row and placed the corresponding Kool-Aid packets in front of the cups to identify each flavor.

She had the kids paint each fruit they'd drawn with the appropriate Kool-Aid "paint." Their creations dried for about 20 minutes.

Once dry, kids could scratch a painted fruit lightly with a fingernail and sniff.

Burkett turned the classic still life into scratch-and-sniff art. According to her, it was a great success. "I felt like Willy Wonka," she said, "as I watched the kids press their noses to their artwork and yell, 'The oranges really smell like oranges!'"

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