Tomorrow is Another One: Exploring watercolors with a 2.5 year old

In through the course of his life (you know, all 2.5 years of it...) little man has explored making art projects with finger paint, paint with brushes, and other things like stickers, using glue to stick different things to paper etc. Up until now he's never used watercolors that I'm aware of so I thought it might be nice to give him something new to explore. I found a Melissa & Doug jumbo watercolor set at Tuesday Morning for $3.99 on an outing the other day so I snatched them up.

Now, I have a slight obsession with Melissa & Doug and absolutely adore their products so it pains me to say that I'm not too thrilled with their watercolors. The texture of them isn't anything like I remember watercolors being like. I looked on Amazon to see what other people thought and it turns out they didn't really like these either. For $3.99 I wasn't out much money and E had fun with them though so it's all good as far as I'm concerned. Next time we'll just get a different brand.

Anyone who has had a 2.5 year old, worked with them, or played with them knows that their attention span is usually pretty short and they love to explore and manipulate just about everything they can get into. Since this was his first time with watercolors today was no exception. The watercolors didn't "melt" in the pod when touched by a brush. I had to wet the brush and swirl each color quite a bit for them to become more soft and liquidy. E saw me doing this and rinsing the brush in between so to him this is what he was supposed to do. He would dip it into the color then swish it in the water bowl!