Rocking and Rolling - painting with marbles

We hosted a play date at our house today and the kids had a ton of fun.  I've been trying to come up with some new ideas for children's activities, and I had recently read about a cool way to paint with marbles.  We gave it a try this afternoon and the paintings turned out really neat!

I set up a few stations with a shallow-sided box with a sheet of black construction paper inside, a few marbles and some tempera paint.  The kids were able to select their paint colors, add a few drops (or perhaps a large splurt!) of paint to their paper, then drop in the marbles and start rocking the box back and forth.  The marbles running through the paint created some awesome patterns on the paper!  We will definitely be doing this project again in the future :)