Wallpaper!

This ones a bit random, but hopefully some great ideas all the same. On Friday, I received a most unusual delivery of about 30 rolls of wallpaper- a parent at my school works at B&Q and they were throwing away a load of end of line rolls of wallpaper that they couldn't sell. She bought them in, knowing that I'd find some use for them- so here's a few ideas:-

1- attach pieces of wallpaper (wrong side out) onto the wall in your role-play area. Children can draw or write on it to decorate the role-play area to match the theme

2- use the paper with any big outdoor art tools like those sold by TTS (we have wheelie painters, foot printers & big mops/sponges). The bigger the paper, the better as otherwise the paint gets everywhere (I speak from experience here!)

3- new idea that I tried last week and my kids loved was mixing a small amount of paint with water in a spray bottle and letting them mark make onto paper. They tried lots of colour mixing and there was also lots of great communication about ideas going on too. Only problem was that paper got so saturated, it stuck to my tuff spots and is taking quite a bit of getting rid of! Wallpaper should be thicker so will work much better next time (I hope)

4- if the paper has any pattern to it e.g. flowers, let the children simply cut them out and use them for cutting and sticking activities. Great for practising scissor skills on a larger scale than usual- good if their fine motor skills aren't great yet

I'm sure there will be lots of other uses as time goes by and my brain has a chance to think but it shows that it is definitely worth asking at big stores if they've got anything useful that they would otherwise throw away. They are usually more than happy for you to have it!