I recently wrote about painting with Q-tips instead of brushes. The following is one of the many Q-tip painting projects I’ve done with lower grade kids. This one we called “funky monkey” because the kids were encouraged to create all aspects of a very unusual monkey. Each kid first got a funky monkey printable (click here: Funky Monkey – printable).

On the back of the page, they wrote their name and the date. Then they wrote key words describing their funky monkey. These key words would be helpful when starting to write about the monkey. Here are some of the questions I asked to help them start thinking about their new character.

• What’s the monkey’s name?
• What’s the monkey’s favorite food?
• What does the monkey do during the day?
• What does the monkey want to be when it’s all grown up?
• What’s the silliest thing about the monkey?

After describing the character, the kids got to paint their monkey using Q-tips. In the white space, the kids could paint anything they wanted about the monkey (paint its favorite food, etc.).

We set the project aside for a few days to let the paint dry. Then chose a writing project from the following options:

• Write a character sketch for the monkey.
• Write a story about the monkey (from the monkey’s childhood, the monkey as a superhero, etc.).
• Write what you and your monkey would do if you could spend a day together.

For the kids who finished painting quickly or wanted a friend for their funky monkey (in their story), they repeated the above steps again with this tiger printable (click here: Tiger – printable).

Finally, the kids got to share their painting along with their writing. We wanted to mount both onto an 11″ x 17″ sheet of construction paper to display them, but we ran out.

Overall, it was a fun and the kids liked using their imagination. You could add variety to this project by giving students more animal options to choose from. To find other printables like these, search “animal coloring pages for kids” (or something similar) on an internet search engine. Choose a coloring page that doesn’t have too much detail (since it’s hard for the kids to paint in).