It seems like kids always love arts and crafts, and the new trend of stone painting is super popular and so fun for all ages! What’s more–you can really elevate the crafty side of this activity and use it across all areas of learning!  I was incredibly inspired when I got to read through the book Stone Painting for Kids and saw so many possibilities for homeschoolers to mesh the creative with the academic!  Read on for lots of creative learning inspiration, sponsored by Dover Publications.

Included in the book are ideas like:

• Geometric shapes (teach your young kids colors and shapes!)
• Numbers (early learning and math opportunities)
• Letters (early reading, spelling, and writing opportunities)
• Hearts
• Faces (including fun cartoon styles that kids will love learning)
• Multi-pebble flowers
• Mushrooms (SO cute!)
• Dominoes (yes! You can make your own dominoes game!)
• Shell painting (fish, butterflies, and more!)
• Chess sets (make your own set and then learn to play!)
• Multi-pebble rabbits and other animals and people
• Words (make sentences, poetry, verses, inspiration pieces, and more!)
• Flowers (combine with your nature studies!)
• Houses and Vehicles (you can make a whole town scene and create vehicles to cruise around!)
• Memory Match game! (perfect for your young kids)
• Sky scenes (including the solar system!)
• Animals of all sorts
• Tic-Tac-Toe game
• Chalkboard paint stones
• Washi taped stones
• Math and counting game ideas
• Storytelling activities
• Spelling games
• Scenes and themes you can make
• and more!

The tons of photos of painted stones and the process to create them are wonderful, and really help you understand the steps you’ll need to take to make something similar yourself. I really like it that stone painting can be as simple as your preschooler would need it to be, but also complex enough to challenge and excite high schoolers and adults.

I spent a few enjoyable hours painting stones with the help of this book, and was delighted to see that even someone like me, that doesn’t have great original ideas for thinking something up, could replicate some of these adorable concepts and end up with a fun little treasure to enjoy!

My favorite items that I successfully made were a sleeping fox, a cute birdie, a ladybug, and a pink and purple A to give to my little granddaughter whose name starts with A.

The other thing I super loved about this book is all of the inspiration to enjoy the creative side of this process, but then use the creations in the learning process in your home.  Imagine how fun it would be for your kids to paint stones with letters and numbers, and later use those to learn sounds and math!  You could work together with your younger children to paint simple stones with just one color per stone, and end up with a wonderful set where you could practice sequencing!  For older kids, you could make a solar system set of painted stones, or write out one word per stone from a piece of poetry or Bible verse that you’re memorizing, and enjoy putting them into the right order or creating displays.  History lessons can be enhanced by painting stones with homes from different cultures and eras.  Nature study can be enjoyed on a rainy or too-cold day by painting stones in ways that remind you of things you’ve seen in your nature walks!  Truly, the possibilities are endless, and this book is a wonderful resource for inspiring you and helping you get started.

The author, F. Sehnaz Bac, is a stone paint artist who sells her creations on Etsy, and in this book she takes us by the hand and provides all of the basic advice on how to get started with stone painting, such as choosing stones and preparing them, what materials you can use to paint and decorate them, technique tips, and more.  I appreciated that the information in the book was straightforward and to-the-point, and that the step-by-step instructions were helpful without being tedious.

I was pleased to find that art supplies I already had on hand worked great for my stone painting project!  The only thing I purchased for this project was a container of craft stones from Walmart for under $5. (They had bags of sea shells available, too!)  Other than that, I used the acrylic paints and the paint brushes that I shared about in this post, plus my collection of sharpie markers and a white sharpie paint marker.  Easy peasy!

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