I did a post not that long ago on  toddler crafts.  What I did in that post was  describe the basic activities that most toddlers are capable of.

The activities boiled down to pasting, coloring and cutting.

The truth is that toddlers should not only be restricted to those activities as  they are capable of much more.

The activities that I listed in the above post are ones that are not overly messy and very accessible and easy for all adults to to to with toddlers.

Toddlers  are not capable of  representational work but there are certainly many more wonderful sensory activities that they toddlers can be involved in without worrying about what they are going to “make”.

So what I decided to do was to direct you to a wonderful blog done by a  Mom who ran a  toddler art group in her home. (she stopped when ready to give birth to her  second child) I did another post introducing her blog The Artful Parent but I add even more of her stuff in this one.

Her blog has many things in it and it may be confusing for you to scroll through the whole to find the right toddler activities that may be appropriate.

So what I am going to do is direct you to specific postings that she has done that I feel are particularly good activities for toddlers.

I basically chose the activities that were totally non product oriented for you to start doing some great process only art with your young toddlers.

The activities are quite messy which is just what these toddlers need so if you are leery of mess don’t even begin.

I would like to share a story that I heard from a friend of mine who runs a preschool program on the importance of messy art.

In my friends preschool program she had a little girl  ( a 2 1/2 yr old) who would not go to the bathroom.

It was causing her alot of pain and stomach problems.

After some research, this friend of mine discovered that the reason for this child’s discomfort was that she was afraid of getting dirty.  Digging even deeper, she found that the mother of this child was a “clean freak” therefor the child manifested her fear of dirt in a physical, damaging way.

In order to help this child, my friend started getting her involved in very messy activities, clay, painting, mushing etc.

The child resisted at first but pretty soon was full into the swing of the messy art activities.

Within a few days, the child was using the bathroom normally.

Messy, sensory activities are very important for very young children and should not be denied to them because of an adults fear of mess.

Though I am not saying that all toddler problems can be solved with messy art activities they are a very necessary part of a young child’s development.

I chose 7 art activities  from this blog “the Artful Parent”  that I think you will be able to do with your toddlers that they will love and get an enormous amount  of satisfaction out of.

Enjoy, and if you yourself do have some fear of mess, do the activities with the children.

You never know, you may loosen up.

A great printing activity:

Printing on canvas (similar to the activity above, but uses canvas as a background)

Collages with natural objects and plaster of paris

Salty watercolors (This one came out of the book scribbles by Mary Ann F. Kohl)

Painting with toddlers

String painting

Liquid watercolors and coffee filters

As I have mentioned in the past. Mary Ann F Kohl is the queen of process only art and you may want to check out some of her books that are great for toddler art. The ones I listed below are the ones that are particularly suited to toddler art.

Scribble Art: Independent Creative Art Experiences for Children (Bright Ideas for Learning)

The Big Messy Art Book: But Easy to Clean Up

Preschool Art: It’s the Process, Not the Product

First Art : Art Experiences for Toddlers and Twos

Structured all about me collages? S ounds contradictory doesn’t it?

Collages are the epitome of non structured art and here I am giving you a STRUCTURED collage titled all about me.

What’s that all about?

Depending on whose presenting them, collages are usually a  pasting activity with a variety of materials that the children can use to create some form of abstract art.

I am a big believer in doing collage in a thought out progressive manner. I did my first post on collage The art of collagae as a beginning on how I would start, I did another post on adding different twists to the collage idea. The idea of collage is to get the children thinking on how to use the different materials.

Very young children are planning placement and deciding if they will plop pieces on top of each other or arrange them in an order on their page. Older children are often trying to figure out how to make representational pictures out of their collage materials

As the children progress through collage activities, we give them collage  projects to do with the materials that are suggestive of the picture they can make.

For instance, they can make a winter collage as each child will create according to her developmental level.

The older the children get, the more sophisticated their  collages are.

There is actually  room for two types of collages. The first, where the children are given materials with no preconceived project in mind, just collaging abstract art and the second where they are given suggestive materials with a project in mind and they will  create something a bit more representational.

The materials that are suggestive will give the illusion of a representational picture even if the child is too young to be able to really make a representational picture.

In the case of the all about me collages, we added a bit more structure to them.

We gave the children the piece of tagboard with a  circle already drawn on it. But that was all. That was just the little bit of help they needed as this activity was to make a person (themselves)

We then presented them with materials that they could choose to create their person,

The fascinating thing about this is that  the developmentally immature children did not even take much notice of the obvious circle drawn on the paper to use as the head but just collaged randomly as appropriate for their age level.

Older children on the other hand will loved that little bit of structure given  which will allowed them to branch out into real creative pictures.

You can see from the pictures above the wide differences in how children viewed the activity and how they were able to relate to creating an actual person out of collage materials.

There are many art purists however, who  don’t believe in giving children any structure whatsoever in their art and may frown on even giving the children the circle to begin with.

Since I am a big proponent of educational art I believe that children need to be helped in their thinking and creative processes and a little bit of structure given in the right doses through the right activity is very helpful for the children’s creative and thinking skills.

So go ahead try this activity. Take  a piece of tagboard (much better for pasting) and draw a circle on it toward the top of the page.

Present the children witha  variety of materials that they can use to create a person.

• Yarn
• Googly eyes
• Small sequins
• Cut up round pieces of shiny paper
• Crafts sticks
• Pieces of cut up straws
• Tissue  paper pieces
• Small pieces of material
• Anything  materials that you have that the children can use to dress or enhance their person

Of course if you want to help them begin by giving them   suggestions on how to use the materials, make sure you don’t tell them directly what to do but give at least 5 different suggestions and this will get their minds working.

Enjoy!

 Halloween crafts and masks. A perfect match wouldn’t you say?

These masks are a long project that takes a few days but well worth the effort, if you are in this to really in this to give the children a great art experience. Otherwise don’t even start the activity if you don’t like mess and need something real easy.

You start with a balloon

When you purchase the balloons, make sure they are of the larger variety, that blow up easily. You’ll probably be best off also if you get the round ones.

You can blow up the balloons or have the children blow them up and then tie them securely.

Then its time to prepare the paper mache mixture.

There are a number of pastes that you can make for the paper mache activity but I used the simple glue and water mixture.

You basically mix glue and water in a 1:1 proportion in a  big bowl.

Have the children or you rip newspapers into long strips.

The basic instructions for paper mache of this sort are to pull each piece of newspaper that you choose through the mixture and then wrap it around the object you are working with.

As paper macheis an art activity that can be done to transform old items to decorate, this activity is creating a mask from scratch and using the balloons as molds. Transforming an object would consist of wrapping the pieces around the object to transform it.

Because you will be making masks you will only put strips around the bottom half of the balloon.

If you would be making bowls you would also only use the bottom half.

You can do this the half baked way or the more solid way. If you want a stronger mask then do one layer, let dry overnight and then do another layer the next day. Otherwi  you can make do with doing 2-3 layers in one sitting.

Once the paper mache is dry, you then take a sharp point and bust the balloons. The balloons will bust leaving a circle shape paper mache in its wake.

What you will need to do then is to cut around the masks to even them off so that they will fit the size of the children’s  faces who are making them.

Once that is done, place each mask on the child who made its face and feel for where their eyes are and cut out a shape for the eyes.

I think a mouth is optional. That’s up to you and the children.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           I guess that will depend on the type of masks they are making.

Now the masks will need to be painted.

We used regular tempera paint and I’ll tell you secret, we were not actually making these for Halloween.  But it doesn’t matter as its all the same process. The only thing different would be how the masks are painted and decorated.

If you want to do a  Halloween them then give them orange and black paint.

If you want to allow them to make Halloween characters then  you will have to offer them items to decorate the masks with after they are painted.

They must be painted either way to cover up the newspaper.

If the children are making witches then they will need various black decorative objects etc.

You will need to supply them with the materials to help them make the characters they want.

After the masks are painted, allowed to dry and then decorate them.You then take pieces of elastic and staple them to the sides of the masks to hold them in place.

These masks are real masks. They are far better in quality and work involved than those simple paper plate masks that so many children making their schools or home situations.

The children will love and are especially fascinated by the process of using the balloons as a mold.

To tell you the truth when you think of egg cartons what do you think of?

Besides cooking and baking that is?  Caterpillars, right? Those typical, copycat, caterpillar crafts so many adults make with kids.

Well! the egg cartons I am talking about there by the way are the type seen below, the Styrofoam ones that have a cover

So I was working on this series to see what kind of art we can give kids with the materiel’s found around the house.

In my experience, when I was teaching years ago, whenever I would ask parents to save materials to use for art or crafts projects, I would get egg cartons. Galore.

So I figured I had to come up with some uses for egg cartons.

Well one really good use for them is to cut ‘em up and use them for glue or even paint. Each child can get their own group of egg holder pieces with glue or paint if you run out of other canisters or containers to use .

So as I was looking at these egg cartons and thinking what art CAN I do with them, my first reactions was “Oh of course”   Cut em up.

So that’s what we did, and I decided to try combining the egg carton pieces with a mosaic idea.

I cut the egg cartons into small pieces and did run into a small problem. You can ONLY cut pieces from the flat part of the carton as otherwise they do not stick.

So I gave the children cut up pieces of egg cartons and added other small cut up pieces of blue foam(because only the yellow egg carton pieces may be monotonous) and told them to create a picture mosaic using these small pieces.

So these are some of the results I got from a just turned 5  year old. she just collaged with them.

…  and  from an 8 year old who was trying to make a vase in mosaic form, but got frustrated….

….and from a 7 year old who used the pieces to create a person.

So I learned a few things.

1. Mosaics are very hard to do with children that don’t have enormous patience as it is very tedious work.
2. Egg boxes aren’t that great for mosaics anyway
3. It may not be worth it to use the egg boxes to cut up if you can find other materials to use.

What you can try using egg boxes for is cutting up the individual egg holders and giving the children, pipe cleaners and pom poms and markers and other stuff you can think of and letting them make flowers out of them.

Otherwise the verdict is…egg cartons are not the greatest for art projects, but good for glue and paint and even sorting and classifying games.

Toddlers and toddler art can get very messy as you are well aware if you involved with toddlers.

I wrote a simple toddler crafts introductory post recently explaining what toddlers are really capable of.

I really wanted to share with you a lovely website called the Artful Parent by woman named Jean who was running toddler art groups and posting about her results along with many images.

This particular post is about their last day in the art group which is really too bad that it’s the last day, but the images and the activities that are run in this art group are just so perfect for toddlers that if you work with toddlers or children a bit older, you must go check it out.

She has so many wonderful messy and sensory activities that she provides for her young charges without any concentration on just the end product itself.

A true process only environment. I would check out alot of her old posts also.

In another  post I found they did one of my favorite activities, collaging but they collaged with contact paper and used no glue. A different twist

I only hope that these children don’t end up squashed later in their schooling environments by over zealous teachers who want them to “make” something.

Or if they do “make something” maybe they’ll learn about educational arts and crafts and do it that way.

On the artful parent blog I found another link in the comments section from another blogger writing about getting creative with toddlers.

If you are looking for real arts and crafts, copycat crafts for toddlers then you are looking for trouble.

Copycat crafts are not good for anyone but for toddlers, they really won’t know what the heck is going on.

Let them just mess, and experiment and have a ball.

There is another post I did based  on the artful parent where I depict 7 activities that toddlers love.

As you see I think she has great stuff in that blog for toddlers.