young srtist

Early Learning Teaching Your Child - Other Topics
1

hello every one

my daughter has always enjoyed art, and i was wondering what you guys where currently doing to nurture your young artist. what age did you guys start? and with what activities?thanks in advance

2

Hi TaylorSummer!
There are so many art options for little ones!
How old is your daughter? Are you looking for sort of a program that has some lessons, some art appreciation, or more of just activities to let her create?

There ARE lots of programs and such that combine lots of elements, so give us a bit more info on what you are thinking and how old your daughter is. It is also possible to simply add art activities to supplement whatever else you are working on at the time, in various media.

We specifically use portions of several DVD-based art programs such as Art Atelier and Home Art Studio, and a learn to draw/write program by Draw Write Now. We have lots of apps and books for art appreciation and EK, and then there are some books that suggest projects arranged by media for very young children.

But for Alex (age 3.5) it has mostly been about letting her try any and everything she could literally get her hands into. Paint of all types, clay, shaving foam, sand, glue, glitter, pottery, paper mâché, pipe cleaner art, leaf collages, etc… And Pinterest is your friend there :biggrin:
That way when she is reading or learning about an artist or style, she has literally had her hands in it.

If you haven’t seen the ‘Katie’ books, a series by a wonderful author James Mayhew, definitely check them out!
They are about a little girl that spends a lot of time in art galleries…but actually crawls INTO the paintings of famous artists. She has wonderful adventures with Mona Lisa, gets into trouble with a waiter in Cafe Terrace at Night, and so forth. I highly recommend them! In fact, any and all of his books you can get your hands on. Alex loves the Ella Bella Ballerina series where the little girl journeys into the stories of The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty…

3

wow thank you Kerileanne99

taylor is 10 months now. I am actually interested in anything to expose her to more art or get the creative juices flowing. currently i just show her painting of great artist. but i dont know what activities i can do with her at this age. I have to look into those books they sound great. are you teaching the fundamentals of art? or more so here is a paint brush go crazy?

4

Hello!

Our baby is eight month old and I have started to collect different age appropriate activities for him at the same time I collect information of early learning activities.We are not artistic at all but I consider art as part of every day life. We are actually more focusing on everything else than this but I would like to be able to bring some new art project idea to our babies life every week. :yes:

Here are art activities we have done already:

  • Flashing famous painters: so far we have flashed European museums power points, and I have downloaded about 20 power points of famous painters and architecture which I am translating to Finnish
  • Plaster sculpture of Magic dough: This is really fun activity! You can get example pictures of this from Google with keywords “baby’s feet to play dough”. The idea is to make home made eatable (?!) play dough. The dough is made by mixing 4dl of flour, 2dl of salt and 1-2dl of water until the mix is like play dough. Then make what ever you want of the dough for example cups, decoration items, snow mans or flowers. You can make the items dry either in the oven (70-150 degrees for an hour until the art work is dry from the bottom) or let the art works dry on the table for 6 hours to 2 weeks depending of the item. With a small baby you can make about 1cm circular high dough plate and then gently push baby’s feet to the play dough. After keeping the dough in the oven it may last even 10 years as it is.
  • Baby’s feet to water color: We also mixed some water colors with water in a jar and the pushed baby’s feet to it. The we moved baby’s feet to paper and framed the result.
  • Self made card to grandmother: Because the baby can only tear paper and rumble it at this point, we made the card for grandmothers birthday by letting baby tear and rumble some 10cm*10cm silk paper peaces which I later put in a heart shape to a card.
  • Practicing with a crayons: This isn’t yet going that well with a 8 month old baby!

And here are activities we are planning to do. This is my first baby so ages when I’m planning to try these may seem funny to you but the idea is to introduce these concepts in the earliest possible age lol

We will do these art tasks immediately when we have suitable time and I have found materials:

  • Buy real life eatable play dough to improve fine motor skills.
  • Buy eatable finger paints and try them outside or in bath room :biggrin:

These we will try within next year and a half

These we will try within next 2 to 4 years:

  • Photographic art project: I also have an idea of an art project as soon as our baby can speak and takes photos with a camera, we will do a project where we will go to a forest and take pictures of objects. Then we will make a book where one page is taken by adult and the other is taken by the child and it contains explanations by both for the technical choices made during the picture taking (why something is included and something left out, why the picture is blurry/not and so on.)
  • Self made coloring book: As soon as the baby can draw, we will ask him to draw a pictures with black pencil. Then I will scan the pictures and print them as a book for him and his friend to color. (This idea is also somewhere from the internet)
  • One day for each color (this idea is probably from the book “Testing for kindergarten”): The idea is to make for example Friday blue, so start wearing only blue clothes, try to identify blue objects and cars, speak what blue things you see and so on.
  • Virtual museum touring: We do this every now and then with my mother if we have nothing to do. Basically we search for and artist and talk about the painting and what we think about the artist and painting http://www.childandme.com/encyclopedic-knowledge-art-paintings http://www.wga.hu/
  • Ice cube coloring art project: This seems like fun: http://www.aarteidentalo.com/projektin_esittely.pdf Sorry the link is in Finnish but from the pictures you can get the idea
  • Mandalas
  • Coloring pictures
  • Museums and art exhibitions about 2-4 times a year
  • Lot’s of fine motor skill practicing
  • Drawing with a computer
  • Playing and projects with magnets, empty cardboard boxes and other more physical art staff (I don’t yet know what this is in real life :laugh: )
  • Plaiting with a plants
  • And a lot of free time (about 5 hours/day) when pens and crayons are available for adhoc artistic bursts

Have fun!