Begin art education lessons by organizing your art supplies with an easy to use system and by teaching your students basic art skills. Many young children have not had opportunities to play with elementary art materials nor have they learned how to use them safely.
For quick and easy art education lessons use the lids from boxes that photocopy paper comes in. The sides of the lids are high enough to keep supplies from falling on the floor but low enough to allow the children to see and reach inside. Keep supplies organized by placing small boxes or plastic baskets inside the lids to keep the items separated. These box lids can be stacked and easily put out for an art center or for an art lesson. When the boxes get tatty they are easily replaced.
Help children have more success by teaching them these art education basics…
I begin teaching art education by teaching the basic skills of cutting, gluing, and painting listed below. Review them often and soon your students will be more independent when using the painting center, the art center, the imagination station or when participating in an art education lesson.
How to use white glue for gluing non paper items
- Teach children that glue sticks work well with paper and white glue works well for non paper items
- Put white glue in empty small jars that gift jams come in.
- Place small craft sticks in the jars. The small sticks make 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 their masterpieces.
- Teach students to keep the pot of glue very close to the area they are gluing so it does not drip across the table.
Glue sticks
- Keep the old ones from the previous year and use them in September to teach the kids how to use glue sticks.
- When the children have stopped experimenting with how they twist up and down, put out the new glue sticks!
Painting with tempera blocks
Teach independence and make it easy for children to reach the sink, paper towels etc. Place the painting stations near the sink and keep wipe up cloths and drying racks within easy reach.
Teach the following process over and over in September until the children have learned it.
Children:
- Get a paper from the pile
- Put their 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 the brush in water and then in the tempera block and say, “Go around and around and around” to get lots of paint on the brush (other wise children will get dull paintings).
- Hang their picture on the nearby drying rack
- Clean their brush, water pot and table.
Easel painting
- All young children need experiences painting with pots of bright paint, large paper and big brushes
- Teach children to paint their name at the top of their paper.
- Teach students to use mixing brushes.
- First, the child puts red paint on with the brush from the red paint; blue paint on with the blue brush in the blue paint, and then uses 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.
- Keep a drying rack close to the easel.
Scissors
- Provide slightly stiff paper with straight lines on them to teach basic cutting (recycled envelopes from the school office work well).
- As children improve, put curving lines on the paper and finally zigzag lines.
- As they master basic cutting, give them regular paper to cut.
- Teach children to return scissors to the correct place and scissor safety.
Experiment with color
- 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.