Have some pool noodles you are looking to repurpose or recycle? I did too, and I decided painting with pool noodles would be a fun project for the kiddos. Once we finished with this project, I rinsed off the stamps and used them as filler for my flower pots. Makes them a lot lighter than other fillers and I liked that I found another use for them!

ETA: I recently did this project again 3/1/23 and covered a tray with tin foil, wrapping the foil under the tray and put the paint directly on the tray. This made it much easier for cleanup and there wasn’t the issue of needing tape for the paper plates.

I had two shapes: round and flower. I got a few of each and cut them with a sharp kitchen knife, in about two-inch pieces. I took Scotch tape and put it underneath the plates so when the children stamped the noodles in the paint, they were absorbent and sometimes the plate would come up with the pool noodle, so to prevent this, a little tape worked well.  We got out some paint and put it on the paper plates, mixed it to our liking and dipped the pieces of swim noodles in the paint and used the pieces of swim noodles as stamps. You can either have some pieces remain in the same color (which we did for the first class), or let students mix and match to their liking (which we did for the second and last class of the day). Personally, I think the “mix and match” method turned out the best but they were all pretty amazing. They created so many beautiful pieces of artwork!

While it’s a fun and easy art project, painting with pool noodles also had some fun sensory elements to it as well. The students liked the feel of the “noodle stamps” and because of their shape and size, they were perfect for little hands to use. While the stamps held their shape, they were also “squishy” which a couple of my students really liked. Clean up was of course very easy — plates and noodles in the trash, or you could probably pretty easily wash them and use them for something else (I saw recently on Pinterest someone had used them in a ball pit which I thought was a great idea. I did a search under “recycle pool noodles” and there were lots of ideas.)

All You Need:
paper plates
pool noodles
knife to cut the pool noodles (about 2 inch pieces)
washable tempera paint
paper for painting (I like watercolor paper because it’s thicker and holds up well)
tape (to tape plates to floor or table)

There are a lot of everyday items you can use as stamps to paint with the kiddos. Tell us about some of your stamping projects.