Activity Idea: Creative Painting

Preschool Quicksource® teaches us that "creative arts support all areas of child development and foster children's imagination and creativity. By painting a colorful picture, singing a song, dancing, and role-playing with their friends, children learn to express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings in new and creative ways."

Art activities provide valuable opportunities for children to not only spend additional time reflecting on lessons, but to learn out to express what they have learned in new and creative ways.

Here's an activity called "Creative Painting" that helps children explore different materials and media in art while exercising their creativity and imaginations. (You can easily add this activity to any lesson.) For this activity, you will need: Paper for painting, various colors of tempera paints, various painting instruments, painting aprons or smocks.

Let's get started!

1. Give the children an opportunity to explore painting with different types of instruments. Besides brushes, you may want to provide: rollers, foam brushes, cotton balls, hair brushes, crumples plastic bags, blocks, sponges, scrubbers, etc.

2. Allow the children to explore how each instrument creates a different mark on the paper.

3. Encourage each child to create a picture or design that uses all of the instruments provided OR create a project using only one of the instruments provided.

If using POCET™, this Activity correlates to Developmental Guideline: CA 5 Explores Drawing, Painting, and Modeling with Different Materials and Media.

For more developmentally-appropriate activities, visit Teacher QuickSsource® and browse through all age areas, including Preschool, Kindergarten, Infant, Toddler, and Head Start. Don't forget to explore activities promoting environmental awareness at Environmental QuickSource®, too!