Today in the garden we have been having lots of fun creating very cool patterns using our gross motor skills and learning about the forces of motion and gravity with a painting technique called pendulum painting.

We started off by looking for resources with holes in them, once collected from around our nursery we started tying string onto the handles and hanging them from the rope. We filled them up with paint, pushing the pendulums watching the paint fall through the holes, each one creating a different pattern.

“This has lots of holes in it.”

”I’m choosing purple because it’s my favourite colour.”

We looked at the patterns made by the paint, we noticed that by swinging the pendulum harder or softer, in different directions and tying the string at different lengths it would create different patterns.

“My one is going super high”

“It’s like a swing.”

“I did a big push and it swings all by itself.”

The children enjoyed pushing the pendulums back and forth to one another and seeing how high they could push them. What a great excuse for some messy play!