Art Experiences
Support Your Child's Learning
Transcript of video
Female: Art activities allow children to express themselves. To explore and experience in different mediums is a wonderful and engaging activity for children. There are many, many things that you can do in the home with your child using readily available items. In your kitchen for example, you can have the regular mop; you can have the bag off of fruit or vegetables, tie it up; little sponges; the coffee filter. You can use the plastic containers underneath your meat or vegetables or fruits. You can use these plastic containers that house eggs. All these things can be used for paint or glue and are easily available to you through your shopping experience.
Child: Make decorations, Mom.
Female: You're making great decorations. Here you go.
Child: Why did you break some of one of those?
Female: Well I wanted to make – I need two short sides.
Child: Oh.
Female: I have two long sides.
Child: Oh.
Female: So …
Child: It's an accident.
Female: Ah, no, I did it on purpose.
Child: Oh.
Female: Yeah. So that I have the right shape. It's like a door, right?
Child: Mm-hm.
Female: Mm-hm.
Female: Through these activities children learn about textures, they learn about shapes and they also learn about colours. They're also expressing themselves and making choices. They're building confidence which is important and it carries over into all other activities that they will be doing throughout their lives.
It is important when children start drawing not to analyze or try and make comments about their drawing. Children usually start with scribbling which is the first phase, and then move to representational drawing. Often children don't talk about their artwork, which is fine. It's best really to just to comment on how much fun they're having and what wonderful colours they're mixing together, and let them begin the dialogue and talk about their work.
It's important to keep in mind that the art is all about process. It is not about the product. And if you focus on the product, children will sometimes pull back and not want to produce anything. So you want to encourage them just to be expressive and to make those choices and to have fun doing whatever they want to do at whatever stage of development they're at.
