My DD loves to draw,
I would appreciate tips how you make drawing fun, wich brand and type of crayons you like the best, websites for fun coloring sheets etc.
Any recommendations are welcome!
Please share!
How do you organize the activities with crayons?
tracing cookie cutters are fun. We do so many things with crayons and just depends upon the type of crayons and the size for each child. My toddler uses super jumbo size crayons and crayons that are called doodles, my 3 year old uses jumbo crayons and my 4 year old uses regular sized crayons. to be honest the best crayons are crayola. We use rose art , and other names but if you intend in using contruction paper to draw on then the name brand works better, but since we are on a tight budget we use the cheapest dollar store crayons. There are many things that we use our crayons for teaching art for the color hues, and so on. We like teaching colors, and tracing shapes like leave rubbings, and coin rubbings, and so on. Sinc ewe are a more hands on family we like using all sorts of objects with our crayons. Tracing an old CD and so forth. I like to introduce markers as well so that they can develop strength in the fingers for writing practice, snapping and unsnapping the lids off and on and matching the lids with the correct marker.
And with crayons melting them down to make new crayons is so fun for the kids and it is coutne das science in the homeschool world.
I love to introduce big easy coloring sheets for the beginners and please sure to to correct their hand position everytime they start to color, this reinforces the proper hand techniques. I on the homeschool forum have some writing techniques if interested.
I like the flip crayons from handwriting without tears. I think my daughter’s fine motor skill has grown from using them, because they are small enough to encourage correct grip and she’s learned to flip them without putting them down or switching hands.
I hear crayon rocks are great if your little one doesn’t have a firm correct grip yet. Or, really, anything small helps.
Other than what is already suggested, there are some pretty cool educational coloring books out there.
For the young starter Crayon is an interesting .My 2.7 daughter enjoy it so much.she also damage and waste accordingly.but I try to recycle them and make them playing tools for her. she also use large size sheet for drawing.I also exposed to her powder colors and water colors.Maximum are naturally made.
You can start -
Rainbow,Various Lines,Curve,horizontal,Verticals
Octopus,Star fish,Fish
Various Shapes.Circles related to sun,Moon, Head, Flower and soo on
Encourage and enjoy with little one.Let it be messy let it be scribble,let the young one explore the color world.
DS has been playing with bathroom markers, bathroom crayons, and artsy bathroom toys since before he was one. Also, he’s been playing with dry erase markers for just about as long. I hadn’t thought about it until i read your post, but it’s been just about a daily activity for him. Now, he’s 29 months and is nearly obsessed with drawing shapes and animals and writing letters and numbers. When he was about 22 or so months he spent some time with my mother doing crafty things - I was on bedrest post delivering my daughter. My mother says that she showed him how to hold his crayons, markers & pens properly, but that it didn’t take much. He holds them the same as I do and I really think that his love for it comes from always having it available from such a young age. If he can’t find anything, he’ll start opening drawers until he finds a pen and he’ll grab whatever paper he can find to occupy himself. Based on my experience, I would definitely recommend dry erase markers and the bathtime crayons/markers/paints - tons of fun too. Oh, DS loves his travel magnadoodle too!
We were able to find some coloring books called Planet Earth - Exciting Earth (from the Dollar Tree actually) that have relatively realistic pictures and the names of all different kinds of animals, so those are great to look for. Oh, and I got an excellent coloring book from a thrift store that is just full of vocabulary words called “My First Word Book” by Kappa Activity Books. I’ll try to take some pics for you shortly, it looks like amazon sells more updated versions on them.
And as far as markers go, we only use very skinny markers as a rule because they encourage a proper grip versus a fist grip. If you have kids under two, this can only be done under careful supervision on account of the marker caps. For crayons, we use the twistables and they’ve worked great for us. For my 3 year old niece, she twists them alllll the way up and breaks them, so I guess it depends on the child. But we find them far superior to traditional crayons. We throw in colored pencils too for fun but I get annoyed sharpening them all the time. 
ETA: The previous post reminds me, we also do dry erase. My beef with those is that they stain clothing, but we use them anyway with old clothes on or a smock over good clothes. We use them primarily to do mazes that have been slipped into protective plastic sleeves so they can be used again and again (thanks AAngeles for that idea forever ago. 
)
If I want to find a particular sort of picture for my DD to color I just google “color in” and the type of picture I want - there are endless sites and I have used many as sometimes I just want something fun and other times I am looking for more realistic pictures to colour and teach with. The National Geographic Kids site has a lot of fun educational pictures to colour.
My DD does not like colouring in - she prefers crafts and painting and writing. I am not sure why - she has never been forced to colour or draw, has plenty of materials around to use and has coloured in quite well on occassion - she just isn’t very keen on it. When her cousin was visiting she did draw more than usual because they did it together - she seems to enjoy most art projects if she has company.
I have decided to do Sketch Tuesday with her: http://harmonyartmom.blogspot.com/p/what-is-sketch-tuesday.html just as a fun exercise this year and to get her doing some art that has a topic. She likes seeing her art on the screen and taking photos of it.
my little one is only at the scribbling stage but I did find some lesson plans on crayola.com that I had saved to my favorites.
http://www.crayola.com/educators/index.cfm?n_id=5
I really appreciate everyone’s tips here.
Thanks
my husband bought us a graphics tablet and my children love it. Ofcourse supervision is required but they love seeing their work come alive on the screen. There are many other child friendly alternatives in the toys section like we bought one from leap frog that the child writes on and follows the dots etc. My love them all.
Thank you for all wonderful ideas and resources!
Really appreciate all the ideas!
Please keep posting!
Karma to you!
The favourite in our house is a water soluble oil pastel! Oil pastels are great they blend well and have such vivid colours but they stain everything. I was SOOOOO excited to find washable water soluble ones.
I actively teach my children " how" to draw. Basically at the toddler stage it involves choosing an object let’s say a pet dog. Look at the dog with your child and discuss the shapes of the body, head , tail, eyes… Then model a drawing of these shapes. When you add the head and tail ask your child where it should go, should the head go under the tail? It encourages them to think and to actually see what they are drawing. They will be very excited when their picture is recognizable! Try drawing large flowers, people, animals and toys.
I also found a huge jump in quality of drawings by providing different types of paper. Amazingly the best results came from a light tan coloured A4 paper and a large A3 reem I bought.
Crayola has excellent triangular prism like crayons. They are excellent for encouraging proper tri-pod grip. This is pretty much all we use right now. We’ll go from here to the jumbo cylinder crayons to the thin ones after that. I would highly recommend using the triangular pencils as well. Mine are called TRY-REX (by Moon Products, Inc).
Also, I’ve been reading in several places about vertical drawing. My SIL is trained as an occupational therapist and she was also talking to me about vertical drawing and gave me some additional ideas to build his writing/drawing muscles.
Vertical Work - draw on anything that has a vertical writing space (whiteboard, big paper taped to the wall, chalk on a fence, window writing, & our favourite - painting in the shower! - super easy clean up too!, soaping down the sides of a dirty car, prop up a cork board and have your child poke thumb tacks in a pattern or just randomly, etc)
Floor Work - lie on your stomach and prop yourself up with your elbows - read books, play “Thumb War”, floor version of a thumb tack activity, pretty much anything you can do without straining your neck - ie. don’t watch a DVD while in this position
what great ideas, kizudo! thansk for sharing thos activities
Here are triangular crayons that i bought :
http://www.amazon.com/Melissa-Doug-Jumbo-Triangular-Crayons/dp/B000MRGWRQ/ref=pd_sim_t_1
and these are printable coloring pages for the popular nursery rhymes:
http://www.mothergooseclub.com/printables.php
My girl is not much into coloring, but she like to scribble and draw. We used all kind of different crayons. But an activity she likes a lot is when I unrolled a long roll of paper ( we had some leftover from wallpaper roll) and let her draw on it on the floor. :yes:
I know researches recommend having larger paper to draw on as opposed to the smaller ones. They argue that the larger the paper, the larger the child’s imagination. So, since they are saying larger is better, they recommend walls and floors. (like maybe huge sheets of paper on walls or writing on the sidewalk)
Also, the larger the paper, the more the child’s arm is in motion. In stead of just the fingers moving, so does the wrist. And if on even bigger paper, so does the elbow. And on even bigger paper, so does the shoulder. Each joint of the arm offers a different radius of coverage on paper, which translates to offering more possibilities of creation on paper. Does that make sense?
I know in Japan, every toy store had this cardboard house or vehicle for sale. It came in the basic shape of the house or vehicle with outlines for windows, doors, etc. But the kids were free to draw on the cardboard as they liked. I don’t know if they have it here in the states. It was a huge hit, but something you could do at home, too, you know? You could combine a few boxes and make it look like robots, fire trucks, whatever your child likes, and enjoy drawing the people and tools, etc. It is fun!
(This doesn’t have much to do with drawing, but also popular was the use of empty milk or juice cartons to make bricks to create animals, giraffes, play houses, vending machines, everything!)
I have a three-year-old daughter who still benifits from coloring IN the coloring books (well, within the lines anyway), but I also heard there are many people against regular coloring books. (After a certain age/stage, I think,) they feel that kids should not simply color IN, but actually learn to draw. I forgot what they called those coloring books. Maybe something like the UNcoloring book, but I cant’ be too sure.
Don’t forget to encourage your child to use both hands to draw (if you’re not against using the left hand for drawing)! It’s a good way to encourage even more brain synapses. Start early before they start to prefer one hand over the other! (I do the same for chopsticks, too.)
My daughter and I like to talk about mixing colors, like making the rainbow with only red, yellow, and blue. She seems to get it. We talk about putitng yellow apple juice in a blue cup to make green apple juice, too. Silly, fun things like that.
Combing songs with drawing is also known to be a good technique in teaching how to draw. I follow a Japanese program for that but I’m sure you can find something like that on youtube.
Hmm, I know there’s more but that’s all I can think of for now.
For a big space have you just considered letting your kid draw on the wall? I gave up one wall in my house. My daughter has been drawing and colouring and scribbling on this wall since she was about 8 months old. Somehow giving up one wall has meant that she has avoided colouring on any other wall. A wall is a huge creative space. And it can always be repainted.
Good idea! I’ve considered it too, but we haven’t been at a place where we could freely paint or repaint walls yet.
Have you heard of the black paint where you can use chalk draw? I thought that was cool, and it’s erasable, too. 
What brand of black/green paint is good for paining a wall to draw with chalk on?
Young At Art is a fabulous book, worth owning, full of ways to teach art to little ones.