Painting for kids is a childhood favorite! Here are more than 50 great painting activities for kids, including painting ideas with interesting tools, action painting, and puffy painting.
Children’s art
Art activities and materials for young children. Art is very important to young children. It gives them a way to let out their feelings and ideas.
Children can learn a lot through art. As children draw, paint, and make collages, they are learning about their world (colors, shapes, and sizes of objects). When they use paints, glue, and markers, children are planning, trying out new things, and solving problems. As children mix paints, they learn to understand one thing can make changes in another. Art lets children make choices.
Children don’t need to make a finished product to learn from art. This is sometimes hard for adults to understand. For young children, what they are doing is most important, not what they make.
Art as a process
Art should be a time to allow the children to express their ideas and experiment with materials. Focus on helping children develop their creativity and enjoy the process of expressing thoughts and feelings through art. Guide, model, and show skills and techniques that can be used to create without teaching. Give children time and places to be creative, explore, express themselves, and experiment. Provide safe and interesting materials for children to use on their own.
Communicate with young children about the process of art. Use insightful open-ended comments that will encourage each child to explore. Avoid general comments that sound as if you are evaluating the children’s artwork, such as “That’s pretty!” or “I like your bright picture!” Instead encourage children to reflect on their creations (“Tell me about your artwork”), talk about what they did (“I see you mixed many colors”), or comment on specific features of their artwork (“Look at the bright orange circle you drew”).
Art should be a time to allow the child’s ideas to come out. Crafts tend to limit a child’s creative ideas. The activities listed below do not allow a child to be creative.
Try to avoid using these
- Coloring books or printed pages to color.
- Creating a craft project for the children to see and make the same thing.
- Patterns to follow or lines to cut on.
- Telling a child what to draw, paint, or make.
- Finishing a child’s work or telling a child to finish it to make it better.
- Drawing things for children.
The best art for children
The best art for children is to present the art materials and let them explore them in their own ways. Let the children choose how they want to use the materials. They will learn more and enjoy art more when they can make their own artwork. No two art projects will be alike.
To an adult, great children’s artwork often looks a lot like scribbles, lines, and even a mess on paper! Children learn by making these lines, scribbles, and messes. It’s what they are doing that’s most important. Children show their feelings and ideas through art.
How to Make Raised Salt Paintings
Raised salt painting is an all-time favorite kids’ art activity that is loved by all ages from toddlers on up. Glue, salt, and watercolors are
How to Do Splat Painting
Splat painting so easy and so much fun for kids! This simple action art activity involves hitting paint-soaked cotton balls with a small mallet or
How to Do Splatter Painting
Splatter painting is a favorite action art activity for kids of all ages! Here are tips and tricks plus ideas for what to do with
