Day: June 29, 2013

Drawing with wet chalk on a driveway is such a fun sensory experience for outdoor play and one that develops so many areas of gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and visual motor skills through sensory play. Drawing milestones like coloring with chalk is part of childhood but this driveway chalk activity builds many skills!

Wet Chalk

We played outside one cool morning and discovered something really fun…We had left a couple of pieces of chalk outside during an overnight rainstorm. 

The texture of wet chalk is so cool! It smears on the driveway so easily and is the neatest texture. For children struggling with tactile defensiveness wet chalk is a great sensory experience because you can grade the dryness or the wetness of the chalk texture.

There was only red and blue that were soaked through, but they combined to make a pretty nice rainbow!

How to make wet chalk

There are several ways to make wet chalk to use on a driveway.

1. Soak driveway chalk in a bucket of water overight or for a few hours.
2. Draw with chalk on a wet driveway. After a rain works or spray the driveway with water from the hose.
3. Crush chalk into a powder and mix water into the chalk dust to create a messy, thick chalk paint. This liquid chalk paint recipe explains more on this strategy.

You can select the wet chalk method that works best for you!

Once you have your wet chalk created, you can get started with the chalk art.

Wet Chalk Activities

We’ve created a list of chalk activities here on the website before so any of those ideas would work. But if you want to explore development of other skills, try these wet chalk activities:

• Make a chalk rainbow
• Make a driveway obstacle course
• Create letters and use a wet-dry-try method of writing the letters
• Mix colors
• Use the wet chalk for body painting
• Paint rocks
• Write names or words

 

Outdoor Sensory Play

Rainbow Handwriting Kit– This resource pack includes handwriting sheets, write the room cards, color worksheets, visual motor activities, and so much more. The handwriting kit includes:

• Write the Room, Color Names: Lowercase Letters
• Write the Room, Color Names: Uppercase Letters
• Write the Room, Color Names: Cursive Writing
• Copy/Draw/Color/Cut Color Worksheets
• Colors Roll & Write Page
• Color Names Letter Size Puzzle Pages
• Flip and Fill A-Z Letter Pages
• Colors Pre-Writing Lines Pencil Control Mazes
• This handwriting kit now includes a bonus pack of pencil control worksheets, 1-10 fine motor clip cards, visual discrimination maze for directionality, handwriting sheets, and working memory/direction following sheet! Valued at $5, this bonus kit triples the goal areas you can work on in each therapy session or home program.

Click here to get your copy of the Colors Handwriting Kit.