The soothing process of painting is often what is interesting to young children. The pleasant feeling of painting over and over using their senses to explore color, process and outcomes. Painting can provide children with vast amounts of learning, this may be developing their fine motor pincer grip or big body movements when crawling or walking on the canvas.
OUR PROCESS: We offer a large canvas so children can have full range of motion when exploring paint on the surfaces. We also offer small individual canvases. Painting does not have to be about sitting at the table with a paintbrush and paint, we try to be creative and offer it to children in different ways. We lay a large plastic sheet on the floor along with a drop cloth and place the canvas on top. Children will freely enjoy rolling around on the canvas making those all important marks. Painting is very much a tactile sensory experience, for some children getting messy can be distressing, so we follow their lead in making the decisions of whether to touch and explore. When introducing the canvases we put them on the floor for children to explore as they are comfortable, as they get older we offer the small canvas on the table so that children can be in an upright position and have the opportunity to be more intentional about their marks. We have also started to offer objects for children to explore while painting, such as cars, balls and large hand brushes. The change in the canvases over time can be seen as the children become familiar with the painting experience by adding colors and creating more marks.
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