Apple Salad Spinner Paintings

Easy apple salad spinner paintings that your kids are going to LOVE! Use kitchen tools to connect art and science.

Festive Fall salad spinner paintings

Some of my most frequently used classroom supplies: paint, crayons, and…salad spinners?!

YES! Actual salad spinners (the kind you use for drying off lettuce).

Salad spinners are one of our all-time favorite classroom supplies, and we always have several on hand in the classroom.

If you have a salad spinner, you’re going to love this.

A paper plate circle is removed from the salad spinner and is covered with regular and neon red paints.

Salad spinner paintings = fun for all ages

When I taught college, one of the courses I taught was entirely on how to teach Art and Science to kids (the dream college class). Each week, I led my adult students in many activities and they would always lose their minds over the salad spinner art.

Art projects are rarely (if ever) just for little kids. When doing these types of projects, make one (or seven) yourself, too!

Looking for more apple projects? These are fantastic:

Torn Paper Apples – Friends Art Lab
Apple Washing Bin – Busy Toddler
Apple Tree Roll and Cover – Fun Learning for Kids

Six bowls of paints, each with small metal spoons. Three bowls have neon red, yellow, and green paint. Three bowls have regular red, yellow, and green paint.

Materials

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Salad spinner – this works with any salad spinner, but we especially love the ones from Ikea
Red, yellow, and green paint – I like having “regular” and neon of each color, but that’s not required
White paper circles – we use the inside part of white paper plates, but you could also use thick white paper cut into circles
Scissors
Brown paper
Green paper
Glue

A view inside of a salad spinner that has a white paper plate circle inside with yellow paints squired on.

Let’s get spinning

The directions are easy to follow, and make sure to have lots of circles prepped and ready to go because kids could make these for hours.

I’m not even overselling it.

Let’s hit it:

Lay a white paper circle into the base of the salad spinner.
Invite your child to add paint to the paper circle.
Once there is enough paint to your child’s liking, put the salad spinner lid on and spin, spin, spin!
Remove the lid and examine the paper circle (this is the best part).
If your child wants to add more paint onto the paper circle, let them go for it. Sometimes our students love it just the way it is after the very first spin, and some like adding paint two or three times per paper circle.
Remove from the salad spinner and let it dry.
Cut a stem from the brown paper and a leaf from the green paper and glue them onto the backside of the apple.
Repeat 700,000,000 more times.

A before and after of salad spinner paintings. The photo on the left shows the paper with paint on it before being spun, the photo on the left is the paper once removed from the salad spinner where the paint covers almost the whole circle.

How does a salad spinner work?

The short answer: science.

Whenever I have a science question, I call my big-brain-genius-scientist friend Mike and he breaks it down for me like I’m a preschooler. (If I’m ever on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and I have one phone call…I’m calling him.)

Salad spinners work well for art (and cleaning lettuce) because of both centrifugal and centripetal forces.

When the salad spinner is spinning around, centrifugal force is what pulls the paint from the paper to the sides of the container.

When the paint hits the side of the container, it stays put and stops moving because of centripetal force.

After doing this a few times, kids will quickly learn that the best strategy for getting the most paint on their paper circles is by adding the paint to its center.

Because of centrifugal force, the paint will move outward, so if the paint is only added to the perimeter of the paper, it will not add much color to the piece.

Yay science!