Doctor Maria Montessori didn’t believe that you could “teach” a child to become an artist; however, she was a strong believer in nurturing children’s creative abilities and teaching them to develop “…an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, and a soul that feels.”
ART is an autonomous part of children’s education. It includes educational and cognitive content that helps to awaken the child’s needs to commune with various works of art, but not only with the classic ones. In working with children based on art, it also stimulates intellectual and emotional development. And we do it through various fields of art: music, art, theater, and literature.
There are many emotions connected with creating art, such as: surprise, contentment, love, fear, disgust, or anger. All these influences have a huge impact on the child, which is reflected in his works. Therefore, it is worth ensuring that art accompanies the child daily and supports his development at every level. It can sensitize you to beauty, but it can also give you a feeling of dissatisfaction at times.
The lack of creative activity among children may cause incorrect behavior and emotions, a negative attitude towards life, or incorrect contact with the environment. Artistic activity shapes motor, visual, and auditory memory. It helps to enrich vocabulary, facilitates communication, improves the ability to analyze and synthesize, and also increases the number of positive experiences. It can relieve tension and inhibit it.
For children, creating artwork is a form of expression, not a way to create beauty. Very often we can see a discrepancy between their skills and enthusiasm.
In fact, in creativity (at least at the beginning) it is not important what you create – it is important to do it at all, to try to look for yourself. The easiest way to express yourself is to draw – and even the youngest can do it.
Children’s drawings develop with age and in literature we can find many descriptions and names of subsequent stages.
For this article, I’ll take this order:
– Scribbles, such as free expression of the child on a sheet of paper – most often a lot of lines and circles;
– then figural elements appear, circles, squares, crosses, which are the basis for the future drawing, and the child begins to name the drawings;
– simplified and primitive diagrams (cephalopods);
– and finally enriched, enhanced, thematic drawings.
The child also uses more and more colors in his works. Often, the child’s initial works are black. This is large because we surround children with light, pastel colors – this is what the house surroundings and the garment look like. Dark colors are different, fascinating, but also clearly visible on the sheet.
Younger children like to paint with paints. They can unobtrusively discharge their energy, for example by smearing all the colors of paints all over the page. For painting, we can use not only a brush, but also fingers, hands, and feet, as well as imprint various objects, create our own stamps, e.g. from vegetables or sponges.
To try at home
In the preschool, we offer children a lot of artwork, which is largely based on the use of development material, most of which we can also do at home.
Examples of works that can be done with children (only our imagination limits us):
- drawing maps – maps of the world, continents, lands, and then coloring them, painting them with paints, covering with playdough, stamping with ear sticks dipped in paint;
- creating animal/plant development cycles, e.g. butterfly development (rice as egg, auger pasta as larva, shell pasta as pupa and butterfly-in the form of a bow-shaped pasta, all glued on leaves around a paper plate)
- drawing zoological/botanical puzzles and filling them with crayons/paints
- self-made books, eg on the structure of a tree (on the contours of a tree, on each subsequent page, a different part of it is marked and signed) or parts of the body of animals, geometric shapes – subsequent pages are subsequent shapes (eg drawn from home appliances)
- drawing home items, then matching them, puzzles
- punching contours/lines with a pushpin – both geometric shapes, as well as small drawings, continents on the map; after careful punching, you can remove the resulting shape and, for example, stick it on a colored sheet, add something to it
- land shaping forms – made of salt mass, plasticine, self-drawn, stamping
- mock-ups
- independent creation of colored plates, eg from yarn and a piece boards / cardboard
- imprinting a leaf soaked in the paint on a piece of paper
- terry cloth, that is placing an object under a piece of paper and painting over it her crayon
- scratch cards – black cards that reveal a rainbow after scratching a piece of paper
- sewing – you can start sewing a button, even with children in preschool age
- playdough molding – still life, animals, the solar system
- sprinkling drawings/contours, e.g. mushrooms, with rice / groats or sand, trees, animals, creating work by sticking tissue paper, cotton wool, cotton balls, sequins, colored ribbons, etc
- flags – coloring/painting, creating your own memory (children love flags!)
- pasting with playdough drawings made of dots
- independent making of language cards
- plastic masses, eg clay, salt mass, dough, paper mass
- assembling pictures from parts – cut postcards, photos or reproductions images
- redrawing oneself in large format
- self-portraits / caricatures.
Artistic activity shapes motor, visual, and auditory memory. It helps to enrich vocabulary, facilitates communication, improves the ability to analyze and synthesize, and also increases the number of positive experiences and experiences.
“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and strength, use it to create.” Maria Montessori
I hope I convince you that art is a good idea for your children. Recently, here in Tirana we have discovered WeArt
I really recommend this place for kids of all ages!
I hope you’ll enjoy art classes as much as we did!
Till the next time,
Much of love!
Joanna
Xxx
