Mushroom stamping: Try this FUN art project

I hate wasting food. So when our mushrooms were just a little too far gone – they had yucky slimy tops –we used them as a mushroom stamp and created beautiful mushroom artworks instead.

The slimy tops of the mushrooms added a fun sensory experience for the kids. They found it so fun and slippery to play with.

I kinda thought it was gross, which is unlike me.

Mushroom stamp — what you’ll need:

Old mushrooms of different sizes
paint brush
acrylic paint
paper
knife (to cut the stalks off)

It was unusual to have mushrooms left over but they were certainly beyond their fresh date. I cut the stalks off at the same level as the head of the mushroom and made a mushroom stamp. All I needed now was to set up a quick paint station.

All the girls were quite shocked that they were going to paint the mushrooms. My two eldest love eating mushrooms so I had to explain that they were no longer fresh enough to eat and we were going to use them in a different way.

Painting the mushrooms was wonderful to watch. They were very focused while painting and I could see that they were studying each part of the mushroom. It wasn’t a surprise when they started to ask me questions. Luckily, I had my phone with me so I could answer (thanks to good old google)!

While playing with a mushroom stamp we learnt:

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies produced by some fungi. Herbarium, 2015
Mushrooms are excellent at decomposing organic matter
Mature mushrooms produce microscopic spores that are similar to pollen or seeds, sometimes numbering in the trillions
The structure of a mushroom

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