Let babies and toddlers get to grips with paint in their own fashion, says Alice Sharp - they're bound to turn it into a performance art
One of the most popular areas of the room for three- to five- year-olds within a nursery is the arts and crafts space. This can be just as true for the younger age groups.
Art activities offered provide babies and toddlers with the opportunity to explore, experiment, imitate, practise and create things with a wide range of materials.
Adults should beware of getting overly worried about the mess made in such sessions, the safety risks and their own role in them. They should focus on the benefits of such activities, and closely supervise them, but allow the art and creativity to take over. Cleaning up the children afterwards can become another experience in which they develop their play.
Each experience should be exciting and stimulating, encouraging active participation and allowing children to be creative in their play. While the babies are dipping their feet into paint, squeezing it through their fingers, smudging it on their tummy and smearing it on the floor, they are experimenting in order to create. This will lead them to appreciate materials and begin to understand how to use them.
During creative activities young children can express their emotions, imagination, knowledge and personal taste. This type of experience also provides excellent opportunities for language development.
Aspects of line, colour, shape and texture can be explored through painting.
For example, blowing paint through a straw requires a child of two and a half to develop a technique as well as allowing them to study how colours mix together to form new colours. A toddler just over a year old can explore the texture of shaving foam with their hands, adding colour (a blob of paint), mixing it, squeezing it, or spreading it over a table top. Or they could make shapes with the moulding of the coloured foam, creating patterns in the mixture with fingers or tools and perhaps even taking a print of a pattern they create.
When exposed to new media or techniques, young children need time to play and experiment, discovering for themselves how to use them, what they feel like and what marks can be made with them, before being limited to a specific task.
When a baby or toddler dips their finger into paint their first reaction will be to investigate it by tasting and smelling, so any such experience must be highly supervised, using safe, non-toxic materials. Children need to become confident with using paint by mixing it, splashing it, rubbing it, scraping it, printing with it and generally making a mess with it, to come to understand the characteristics of this medium. Gradually they will make marks with the paint, and given the chance, young children will paint themselves a rainbow.
While making such marks children are learning from the physical pleasure of touching the paints and making 'changes' to their environment. What may seem like a chaotic mess to us actuallly reflects children gaining experience, developing skills, expressing emotions and eventually controlling movements to be able to make more particular marks.
As young children become more familiar with paint and practises using it in a variety of ways, improving their concentration and developing their interest, they will begin to use the paint not just for its own sake but consciously to create ideas to reflect their experience and imitate their environment.
It is very important that adults do not interfere in this natural development by trying to make children produce recognisable 'painting' before they are able. The adult should simply offer support by providing them with materials, space and opportunities, and by giving plenty of encouragement and praise.
Young children should not be constrained by adults restricting the materials and expectations - for example, they should not be made to use brushes on paper. Even though young children may be capable of using them, these tools might inhibit their spontaneity and self-expression and lead to frustration.
Painting is a creative activity that gives children the opportunity to play with colour and to become familiar with texture, while making marks and creating patterns. It gives children experience in touching, feeling and exploring. They learn to flex and stretch their muscles and to develop co-ordination as they manipulate and mould the paint and the textures that paint can be mixed with. After all, the artists of the future will only appear if they are allowed to play freely with materials.