As a stay at home mom, bringing art into the house can be scary and intimidating. After all you spend most of your days cleaning up messes, why would you want to add more mess to clean?
Art can be a fun way for preschoolers to explore and learn. It also offer a bonding experience with your child and memories that can be preserved for a lifetime.
Here are some simple activities to get you started and give you some direction.
Handprint Art
This art offers great keepsakes that will allow you to watch as your child grows. You can laminate to save for years.
Caterpillar
Check out the book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar from the library. Read the book with your child. Then use a green stamp pad or green paint to make your own caterpillar out of handprints. First use the hand minus fingers for the head, then stamp the hands upside down, three in a row for the body.
Candy Corn
Paint the bottom of the hand yellow, paint the middle orange, and fingers white to make a candy corn handprint.
Turkey
You can see where I am going with this. A fun variation is to do their feet brown then do red, yellow, orange handprints at the top for feathers above the ball of the foot. Draw legs, a beak and you have the cutest turkey.
Reindeer
This uses the foot as well. Paint the foot brown again. Then place black handprints at the top for antlers. Allow your child to glue wiggly eyes and a red puff for the nose.
Other activities not involving keepsakes
Go online
There are tons of crafts and coloring sheets online. Go to nickjr.com and print out their favorite character activities.You can also go to Pbskids.com or playhousedisney.com
Pull out the playdoh
You can make all sorts of creations with playdoh. Allow your kids to be creative or pull out your cookie cutters.
Food art
Let them paint with a popsicle. Do apple prints, paint with carrots, anything out of the usual that they would find appealing.
Shaving cream
Spray shaving cream on your table. Pull out the cars, animals, cookie cutters etc. just to let them create shapes, patterns, etc. in the cream.
Holiday art
Holidays offer all sorts of opportunities for art. Let your children paint a mini pumpkin for Halloween or do leaf prints in the fall. Glue cotton to black paper for winter. Put holiday stickers on a scene. Get creative.
My suggestion is to hit the teacher supply store and dollar store to stock up on art supplies. You can never have to many mediums. Buy everything from markers to paint to tissue paper to stickers. Then if you are ever at a loss, pull out the tub and let your kid take the lead. You will be surprised at how creative your child can be in art.
Feel free to leave any other suggestions in the comment section below.
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