Art most definitely belongs anywhere children are. In the kindergarten, nursery, preschool or any early childhood setting.

As I believe very much in the Educational Art theory (as I explain in my free report) there is SO much art to do with children that is NOT copycat cat arts and crafts. I don’t know why the web is so over saturated with boring, copycat arts and crafts.

If you happen to be an early childhood teacher working in a center based classroom you may be interested in reading a post I did on a different blog of mine called preschool musings.

In a series all about centers I go into detail about the three types of art that can be done in an early childhood classroom and how you can add an exciting art center into your kindergarten classroom as one of your centers.

I would write it up here but you can get the whole post by clicking on the link above.

You can use the ideas in that post at home also as I explain at the end of the post.

Shapes are all over the place and there are many ways to explore shapes. We will be doing some shape work through drawing and we have introduced beginning shapes in a beginning collage when we started with collaging with circles.

In this painting series I wanted to bring shapes into the picture (literally)

I created a chart with many different cut out shapes, some geometric and some organic(free from).

I explained two ways of painting shapes.The outline method and the blob method.

The outline method is  utilized by  making an outline of the shape  itself and the blob method is just painting the shape itself without creating an outline.

I had the children make an assortment of shapes on their papers using whichever method they preferred.

Then they had to make a painting using many different shapes by covering the entire paper with their shapes.

Below is a copy of one child’s two paintings.

shape painting

As a continuation of discovering shapes we extended this activity further .

The children were told to make pictures with a  pen or pencil that were as they call it “scribble scrabble”.

They were then instructed to look for different shapes in their scribble scrabble’s and to outline as many shapes as they could find within their pictures with a marker.

It is a very interesting experience for the children and a new way of seeing shape.

After they did this they colored in their shapes.

Cut them out.

And collaged with them.

[nggallery id=4]

Shapes are all over the place and it’s very important for children to notice shapes in things order to be able to paint (or draw).

This was a great activity for the kids as it encompassed a string of directions and follow through. Plus many skills were included in this one activity.

• They made scribble scrabble (which they loved)
• They found shapes within with markers (a new way of looking at things)
• They colored those shapes  (can be done with crayons and makers and doesn’t have to be only colored solidly)
• They cut them out. (some of the shapes were tiny and the cutting was not so easy for many of them)
• They made a collage

I actually think many ages can enjoy doing this activity.

Great for a rainy day. (or sunny for that matter)

Enjoy!

Preschool kids can collage without scissors.

I know it sounds unusual as collage for kids is usually done by using various kinds of paper and the children often need to cut them up into the sizes they want.

Torn paper collage is another collage in our series that encourages the children to come face to face with a new way of doing something.

They now have to think of how they will create a collage without precut pieces and no scissors.

The instructions for this  collage are simple

The children are given a choice from a stack of construction papers to choose two colors and two colors only. (at least for the first collage)

Once they have their two papers they are told that they are to use one color as the base and the other paper they are to use to collage with.

The only problem is they have to create the pieces they wish to collage with on their own by tearing the papes they will collage withand there are NO SCISSORS allowed. Only glue.

The children may get a bit disconcerted at first, especially if they are not used to creating independently. If they are, they will like the challenge and get to work.

Below are samples and what you can expect from different ages.

The first one below was from a 4 year old child. Younger children than this will often create similar pieces. Random tearing and just gluing the papers all over the place without much thought.

The two collages below were children around the same age as the one above but it is obvious that they were giving thought to the placement of their pieces.

The children below were obviously a little older children and they were actually using this activity to create representational pictures which shows a much higher level of maturity than the previous children.

Very often I give children another challenge  after they finish the first one   and this time was no different.

I told the children that they were to make a second torn paper collage but this time they could also add feathers to their collages.

Some children used only the feathers but others took the assignment seriously and added feathers to their torn paper collages.

When you are doing this with children you can add many variable to make it interesting.

• You can use brown kraft paper as a background and give the children classified sections from the newspapers to tear(this was the activity I was given to do in my art for teachers class in graduate school)
• After the first collage you can allow them a number of colors to choose from to tear
• You can add different materials at different times. Googly eyes, crafts sticks, sequins etc are just some of the items you can add.

Be careful though that you don’t add too much as they will not concentrate on the torn paper idea but will make it into another collage which you can save for another time.

I absolutely love this activity. I hope you do too.

Here are two images we used in painting textures with the children.

View the short video and then read the post about it.

So in case you didn’t get exactly what we did, here’s the scoop.

I had previously worked with these kids on creating all types of lines.

To take it further I showed them a  number of materials as seen above of textured materials and talked about how the lines can show texture.

We then went over what some of the lines are.

I gave the children thin brushes and one color dark paint so they wouldn’t get distracted. I wasn’t sure how much the kids got out of this. There may have been too much of a mixture of ages to do this. The older kids got it more than the younger ones and the 4-6 year old didn’t really get the idea.

Below are some of the results.

I’d  love to hear how anyone’s came out with their own kids or students if you could share if you try this activity.

I think painting and drawing textures is a bit of an advanced activity to do with young children.

Am I wrong?

Painting with kids is usually done at an easel. This type of painting was something called tray painting as we use a tray for the children to mix the colors on.

They only get the primary colors and they mix them on the tray. When you don’t have a good tray, aluminum foil works great. It’s actually better in some respects as you can just throw it away when you want another one and the cleanup is easier.

I have a great free   a great kids crafts where you can pick up all about the differences between art and crafts that has detailed explanation of how to do tray painting.

As in many of the art activities I give children I like to give them some parameters of what to make.

It really gets them thinking about what they are doing.The first painting they were allowed to create what they wanted.

The second painting below they were told to cover the entire paper with shapes leaving no white spaces.

The children above got the idea while the child below didn’t grasp the concept of leaving no white space. All she heard was shapes all over the paper.

This child was  bit older and thought she was funny as she created one big rectangular shape. At first I mentioned to her that I see she didn’t want to do shapes and she said “Oh yes I did, I made one big rectangle.”

The next assignment was to see how many hues they could get out of different colors and one child took the shapes concept and created her hues in shapes all over the paper without exposing any white.

Doing this type of painting is more versatile than easel painting as

1. You don’t need an easel
2. You can do it anywhere, on tables on floors
3. There’s only one brush so there’s less to cleanup
4. Lots of kids can do it ant one time while at the easel they are limited to two (usually)