Product Menu

Shop Help

Need to talk to someone?
Call us on 08 9313 8884

Shop Safe!

VISAMaster Card

Our site uses 128bit SSL encryption making your shopping experience safe and secure. All prices are shown in Australian Dollars.

Educational Value of Play - Painting

 

Painting and Printmaking

Children love to paint. It is a wonderful means for them to express themselves and experiment with colour, shape and line. They should be allowed opportunities to paint inside and outside.

There are many different ways for children to paint besides the traditional paint and pot. You might like to put thick paint into a squeezy bottle and let children squeeze it onto the paper. Put watered down paint or dye in a squeezy bottle so they can squirt on the paint. Add pva glue to paint and then mix in glitter, or coloured rice to make a lovely paint with texture. Look out for more ideas in our monthly newsletters.

Physical

Painting is excellent for developing children’s fine motor skills and their hand-eye coordination.  Using large surfaces to paint on - such as plastic pegged on a fence or windows, allow children to develop their large muscle control (gross motor skills) as well as they make bigger movements.  Encourage them to use the whole surface of whatever medium they have.  Often children make a tiny picture in one corner or the middle instead of using the whole space.

Language/Social Development

Painting is a perfect opportunity for children to share ideas and equipment and learn how to clean up after themselves. They develop concepts of shape by creating their own shapes, visualizing how shapes around them are defined, combining shapes, changing shapes, dividing shapes and multiplying shapes. It allows them to experiment with colour – see the results of mixing colours and what new colours are formed.

Children can experiment with texture using different mediums. Finger paints allow children to feel what they are painting.  They can make a picture, then mush it up and start again! Lie a piece of paper over their finger painting and press down - a print will result for the child to keep. Squirt an aerosol can of shaving foam on a laminated surface, (add food colouring if you like) and let children make a picture (cleans their hands (unless you add food colouring) at the same time – bonus! ). Also a good way to encourage older children to practice their spelling words.

 

Maths/Science Concepts

Mathematically, children are using paint to cover an area of paper, developing spatial awareness.  They are making pictures by combining shapes and learning about straight lines and curved lines and open shapes and closed shapes.  
They are dealing with volume - pots of paints that are full, half full etc and seeing that different shaped containers appear to hold different amounts of paint even when they actually hold the same amount.

Paint is the perfect medium for children to learn about the properties of colours and how they mix. As children combine colours they will see how they can make as many colours as they wish, from just a few colours.
Red, yellow and blue are called primary colours.
Combining two primary colours produces a secondary colour and combining secondary colours produces a tertiary colour and so on.  As well as using colours straight from the pot, give them an icecream container lid and let them experiment with mixing.

Using some of the different forms of paint allows children to experiment with different forms of substances.  They will see how the thickness and texture can differ with different mixtures. They will see how thicker mixtures move on the paper differently to very runny mixtures.  They will also see how the different forms mix together differently. 

Printmaking

Printmaking is where paint is applied to a surface rather than a brush and then the surface is pressed onto paper.  

  • Children love making hand and foot prints and these are a lovely memory of how children have grown.  Paint the surface of their hands or feet and then let them press them onto paper.  For 3D prints use a tile of clay or plaster of paris.
  • Vegetable printing is fun for children.  Potatoes and carrots cut into shapes and sticks of celery are excellent surfaces for printmaking. Add a dob of paint to a dishwashing sponge sitting in a foam meat tray and press the vege shape into the paint and then onto paper.
  •  Kitchen utensils are another fun surface for children to use for their printmaking.  Forks, spatulas, egg flips, cookie cutters etc make interesting designs.  Speaking of the kitchen - painting the surface of a fish makes a great print!!!
  • Other household items such as cotton reels, ends of pencils, toys allow children to experiment with pattern.
  • Scrunched up paper, chunks of foam, kitchen scourers make a wonderful texture for a picture or its background.
  • The garden is a mass of surfaces - leaves and flowers being the obvious ones, but don't limit their imagination.  Perhaps the mini beasts living in the garden could be a no go zone!
  • Car prints and marble prints are lots of fun.  Find a box that will fit a piece of paper.  Squirt some different colour blobs of paint onto the paper and then add a few marbles or a toy car.  Watch the pathways that are made as children move the box around to make the marbles/cars roll around.  See if they can make the objects go to all four corners and cover most of the surface.