Art for Children - Teach these 8 skills for art success
Art for children - Many young children start daycare, preschool or kindergarten without basic art skills and have not had opportunities to explore art projects or products.
Also some educators and/or parents of young children, are reluctant to set out art or imagination station centers due to the mess they create.
Try teaching the few basic art for children skills below and your students will have more success with art activities and art or imagination station creations and you will have less mess to clean up.
1. Teach kids how to use white glue for gluing non paper items
- Put white glue in empty small jars that gift jams come in.
- Place small craft sticks in jars which makes it difficult for students to use more than a little dab of glue at a time.
- Call the white glue "little dot glue" and teach the kids to use only little dots of white glue when creating in the "Imagination Center.
- Teach students to keep the pot of glue very close to the area they are gluing so it does not drip across the table.
2. Let them experiment with glue sticks
- Keep the old glue sticks from the previous year and use them to teach the kids how to use glue sticks.
- Don't put the new glue sticks out until the children have stopped experimenting with how the glue sticks twist up and down, squeezing the glue to find out what it feels like and discovering how much pressure it takes to smear some glue on the paper!
3. Make painting with tempera blocks an independent activity
Art for children can be an independent activity. Make it easy for children to reach the sink, place the painting stations near the sink and keep paper or other towels and drying racks close by.
Teach the following process over and over until the children have learned it.
- Get a paper from the pile
- Put name on the back of the paper before painting.
- Fill a shallow margarine tub half full with water and carry it to the table
- Get a brush and check that it is clean.
- Put brush in water and then in tempera paint and say, "Go around and around and around" to get lots of paint on brush (other wise children will get dull paintings)
- Hang picture on the nearby drying rack
- Clean brush, water pot and table.
6. Teach the basics of easel painting
- Art for children should include experiences painting with pots of bright paint, large paper and big brushes.
- Teach students to use mixing brushes;
- First, put red paint on with the brush from the red paint; blue paint on with the blue brush in the blue paint, and then use a mixing brush to mix the colors right on the paper.
- Keep the mixing brush in a paint pot that has water in it.
- Color code brushes and paint pot lids if possible.
7. Teach cutting with scissors in little steps
- Provide stiff paper with straight lines on them to teach basic cutting.
- As children improve, put curving lines on the paper and finally zigzag lines.
- When they master basic cutting with stiffer paper, give them regular paper to cut.
- Teach scissor safety.
8. Make room for color experiments by limiting color choices
- Include room for experimentation and discovery when teaching art for children
- Provide only yellow and blue paint for a few days. Let the students play.
- Then put out only red and blue paint for the next couple of days.
- Other days offer only white and red.
- Each day have some children show their pictures and talk about the colors they used and new colors that they created.
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