Art Activities for Kids at Home

Process over product, which sounds like a slogan and turns out to be a practical instruction with specific consequences. What changes is what you provide, what you say, and what happens to the result.

What to provide

Materials rather than projects. Paper of different sizes and colours, paint, chalk, charcoal, clay or dough, glue, scissors, collage material, string, fabric.

Avoid: colouring books, kits with a picture of the outcome, and templates. All of these have a correct answer, which makes them craft rather than art. Craft is enjoyable and it is not the same activity.

Worth trying

• Big paper on a wall. Vertical drawing builds shoulder stability and changes what children make. Tape a roll to a fence or a door.
• Painting with things that are not brushes. Sponges, string, leaves, forks, feet.
• Collage from a box of scraps. No picture in mind, just arranging until something appears.
• Clay or dough with no goal. Squeezing, rolling, pinching. This is fine motor work as much as art.
• Chalk outside. Enormous scale, temporary, and the impermanence removes the pressure.
• Drawing to music, changing the music halfway.
• Blind contour: draw the object without looking at the paper. Ridiculous results and it genuinely teaches looking.
• One colour only, which is a constraint and constraints help.
• Making a book: fold, staple, fill. Children take this far more seriously than a single sheet.

What to say

Not "that's lovely", which is an assessment and teaches that the point is your approval.

Better: describe what you see. "You have used a lot of blue here." "This part is very careful and this part is fast." Or ask: "Tell me about it."

Describing is not withholding warmth. It is showing you actually looked, which children can tell the difference between.

What to do with the results

Not all of it can be kept and children know when something is being politely stored. Let them decide what matters. Photograph the rest and recycle it, openly rather than secretly.

Display a few, rotate them, and include the ones they chose rather than the ones you liked.

The one to avoid

Drawing it for them, or improving it. "Shall I show you how to do a hand?" ends the activity, because now there is a correct version and theirs is not it.

If a child asks you to draw something, draw it badly and cheerfully. That answers the request and keeps the door open.