- several colors of washable paints
- white paper
- q-tips
- ink pen or pencil.
Letter A Dot Painting Hands-On Activity
Introduce the letter A to your child with this hands-on activity. Creating a letter a dot painting will build letter recognition, fine motor skills, and hand-eye coordination. More advanced students can build sight word dot paintings instead. This project is the perfect follow-on for our lowercase letter a craft.
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Encourage your child to match the dots to the lines. This will reinforce the shape of the letters and build hand-eye coordination. If you let your child place dots wherever they want, this project will not be as effective. However, as long as they are trying and doing their best, it is good enough. Should your child need help lining up the q-tip at first, you can gently hold his hand and guide it for the first few times.
While this letter a dot painting seems like a simple project, it is not necessarily easy for little hands to hold those q-tips and aim for the lines. Patience and practice is the key to successful hands-on activities. Any time a project is too frustrating for your child or starts causing melt-downs, take a break. You can always come back to the activity at a later time.
Hands-On Activities Take Time and Practice
The more time you spend with hands-on activities, the more your child will understand what is expected and enjoy the experience. Take your time, and exercise lots of patience if this is the first hands-on project your child has experienced. The value of this project is in the process, not in the finished product, so don’t place too much emphasis on how it looks or help too much. Praise your child for working hard and listening well, and not how the project looks.
Watch Letter A Circle Time Here!
Supplies for Letter A Dot Painting
To help your letter a dot painting experience go more smoothly, you should get everything out and set up ahead of time if you can. If you have lots of littles underfoot I know this can be difficult. Perhaps you can take the opportunity to set up the project during nap time or quiet time. This is a list of the items you will need to complete the letter a dot painting.
- several colors of washable paints
- white paper
- q-tips
- ink pen or pencil.
5 Dot Art Paintings for Kids
Dot art paintings have a rich history in Australia. Aboriginal people from the land down under traveled across the country and used symbols to communicate with others of the same tribe. That’s when aboriginal symbols depicted in the form of dots, lines and circles transpired. These symbols are used to represent men, women, stars, fire, waterholes, water, creeks, sand hills, spears, campsites, even a group of people gathered around a campsite.
It’s amazing how a group of dots, once disseminated in the past, played a vital role in recordingandretaining momentous information, thus illustrating Dreamtime stories.
Today, dots are merely blots on paper. But to kids, they can be an art project waiting to happen! Dot art paintings are a great way to get kids’ creative juices started. Not only are they easy to make but they’re fun, too!
There are several ways to create dot art paintings. Different “canvases” can be used for painting, too: cardboard, white paper, brown paper — even a rock with a plain, smooth surface — whatever piques their interest! So how do we start making the dots? Pretty easy. Here are 5 dot art paintings and tools your kids should try. The best part is you can use a lot “waste” that you can recycle for this fun project.
Get a couple of pencils with their erasers intact. You can sharpen the erasers until they are different sizes, which then can be used for differently sized dots. Why don’t you try letting your kids start on a simple flower outline and use as many colors as possible for the petals!
Aaahhh, the go-to for dot art paintings. Using Q-tips can give your kids more control. What they can do is tie up a bunch of Q-tips. Each bunch should have assorted pieces of Q-tips so the dots will come out in different sizes! Try a kangaroo or koala outline for this activity.
You also can keep it simple by using toothpicks. The same goes with your Q-tips: tie a bunch of toothpicks into small and large bundles, depending on how big or how small you want your dots. This time, let them paint a collection of stars different colors!
Get those unused chopsticks out of the kitchen cabinet and start outlining some mandala designs for your kids to try.
No kid will ever go wrong with traditional small brushes with a blunt and circular tip. Push them hard and you get a huge dot; tap them lightly and you get a small dot. Try a beautiful mountain-behind-the-trees outline this time.
There are no rules regarding the tools you can use for dot art paintings. You can search your house for any kind of object with a circular tip. As for the designs, let your kids use their imaginations. Any design will come out great if done with love!
To learn more about dot painting check out this link
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