Hello everyone
I have read in various places in the forum about 'salad spinner' painting. It sounds fun and I'm always looking for new ideas. Please can someone tell me how you use the salad spinner for painting?
Thanks!
Beehive

It's fantastic - we do these around bonfire night usually with those really bright paints and white on black sugar paper. It takes a while cutting out the circles of paper to put in, but well worth it. Even the most reluctant mark-maker comes to have a go!

You just put the paper in, put a mini teaspoonful of various paints dobbed about on the paper and put the lid on and they child spins the handle. The more adventurous like to pour paint in whilst another turns the handle! (But that can end up being a bit 'heavy on paint, and impossible to lift the sodden paper out afterwards!)

If you have able children then they can cut their own paper circles of course!

We love doing them too and made "spinning Catherine wheels" for bonfire night. I found I needed to put a tiny blob of blue-tak under each piece of paper, because as you spin faster and faster, the weight of the paint sometimes sets the paper spinning within the spinner.

ok, sounds fantastic and i can't wait to have a go.................................BUT.........................and excuse me if I'm being particularly woolly-headed here...........what happens to spare paint as it whizzes around?? does it shoot out of the sides, and if so, how do you control that???or is it simply a case of tiny bits of paint going a long way??

Well ours is contained within the spinner as there's a grid thing that the paper sits on, I suppose when it's being used for salads the water hits the sides and just runs into the bottom. There aren't holes in the sidea like a colander, or you'd get soaked spinning your lettuce

ah..........................all the ones i have ever had, had holes in the bottom to allow the water to drain away, hence my question !! LOL

Hi Narnia, I got soaked using a salad spinner with holes in it..........thought someone had broken it

There are spinners out there which are fully enclosed and I guess these are the ones Cait is talking about. The water remains at the bottom and you just lift the spinner thing up and empty the water out.

We've done this activity too in the past with great success.

We sit our salad spinner in a seed tray to catch the gunk - obviously seed tray must not have holes in it

Do lots of things with salad spinner - such as spiders webs , white paint on black disks with little silver glitter for frosting - v. effective

also use for colour mixing practice to encourage children to predict what colour they will get after the spin

Fluorcent (I don't think that's spelled right) paint also great.

This term we excelled ourselves and did a complete solar system using salad spinner paintings

Need to go and lie down now after all that creativity

Thanks for all your replies. I can't wait to try it...sounds like the possibilities are endless! And somehow it seems like a much more exciting use for the spinner than drying lettuce!
Beehive

It's a huge favourite with all our children - they'll often ask for it spontaneously.

We did some this week!
Our spinner is fully enclosed so no paint leaks out. We bought some droppers/pipettes and used very watery paint in trays and old hand soap containers (the ones with the push down spouts). The more able children could use it more independently and the less with more support. Very good activity for the children to experiment with mixing colours, sequencing and talking about changes. We only have one spinner at the mo, but the other children at the craft table became engrossed with using the pipettes to mix the paint from tray to tray and straight onto their paper, sometimes creating bubbles to pop. At home we used to have an ELC paint spinner, but the salad spinner is much more effective!

This sounds great! Do you put the circle of paper in the bottom of the spinner, with the paint on the bit that spins round? Or both on the bit that spins round? Sorry if that's a stupid question!

Paper in the bottom, drip paint in, SPIIIIIIIN!!

Works for us

yep. It's the cutting of the paper circles that's the only thing that slows this down - I can't keep up the production speed when the children are at full tilt - we have two spinners!

and you got your salad spinner from?.........

well I got mine from ebay as I couldn't find one at the time, but I saw loads for sale in Home Bargains last week. I imagine any kitchen shop should have them though.

I got one from a market stall last week........only £2.99.

Oh great I like resources that don't cost the earth!