I found a bottle of Elmer's rubber cement in my teaching closet this past weekend. This morning we did a little painting with paintbrushes and rubber cement onto paper. I created a few secret messages for my little guy and he created some secret pictures for me.
After we let the cement dry... we whipped out our dot markers and decoded the messages/pictures.
Surprise!!
The little guy was so excited to see his initials and his name
I was almost giddy as I wrote his name because it was so fun to see him discover his initials as he painted over them. Once the paint was dry we rubbed off the cement (it becomes gummy and easy to rub or peel off) so the picture was more clear.
This technique will definitely be used again to write secret notes, practice our numbers, decode secret shapes, etc. I have used it before with art projects in my classroom, but not at home with my son. He loved it. We tried out different sized paint brushes as we experimented too. This is definitely an adult supervision required at all times activity. The fumes from the glue are pretty strong and the glue is kind of a pain to get off of hands (mine got covered when I cleaned the paint brushes). If you have kids who might try to eat glue or lick gluey fingers, don't try this. 🙂
If you use rubber cement for projects, pass along any other suggestions... safety or otherwise. I would love to find some more fun ways to use it in our art projects.
We tried wite-out art using wite-out tape. But the tape didn't work out as we expected:-(
May be Correction fluid may work good.
creativitymypassion.blogspot.com/2011/09/wite-out-correction-tape-line-art.html
Thanks for the great idea! I just made a bunch of papers with secret messages for my kids to paint/color on Monday with my MIL while I'm at work so they know I'm thinking of them! 🙂
My kids would love to do this! Great idea- Thank you for linking up to The Sunday Showcase.
Esther- Good question! You should definitely try it out. Since it isn't glue and I don't think it comes up without ripping the paper, I don't think it will work the same, but it could provide a fun effect and be a totally different project. Let me know what happens when you do it.
Can we use Wite-Out Correction Fluid? Need to try out!
Hmmm, I would like to play around with this idea some more.