Question
How can caregivers make art experiences positive ones for infants and toddlers?
Answer
Caregivers in the early childhood environment have to be prepared to support the art activities of infants and toddlers. The art experiences have to be positive ones for young children. It's our job as architects of this kind of environment and architects of the experiences to make sure they are positive. Here are some tips to get you started.
1. It's really important that you prepare for a mess. Often, as early childhood educators and probably as adults, we see the word mess as a negative. To a child, a mess is a product of work. Mess happens, and that's kind of par for the course, but we've got to make sure we're setting up a space where children can be free to be creative and messy. We don't want to limit children's creativity in order to prevent making a mess, and really, that's the opposite of what we want to do. Making a mess is half of the purpose and 90% of the fun. We want to remember that it's their space, and their space needs to be used for what they need it to be used for, and sometimes that means making a mess.
2. We want to avoid giving directions. Directing children as to what to do or what to make with their art removes creativity from the process. If you think about it, giving directions to the children removes them from the process. It's not your art, it's their art. So instead of telling toddlers, "Hey, why don't you make purple – mix that red and blue paint?" you might try to encourage them by saying, "You know what, I wonder what would happen if you got the red and blue together?" Or, when it does mix, you might say, "Whoa, what just happened there? Man, how did we get that purple color?" That's really how it becomes a natural facilitation strategy for teachers. I say natural, not that it comes naturally, but that it can flow very naturally once it becomes a habit for you.
3. When it comes to art, you want to really speak specifically. You want to make sure that you're leaving out your personal opinions like, "Oh my gosh, I love that art! "Oh, that art is so beautiful!" Not that that's bad, but what happens then is the child is dependent on your opinion to develop and determine the worth of his art, whereas he should be the one that's telling us the worth of the art. But we want to be specific and we want to say things like, "Man, you are using a lot of blue in your picture!" It's not an opinion, it's not a positive or a negative, it's simply stating what we notice.
4. We want to explore the child's process, so ask the toddler to tell us about their creation if they're verbal. Sometimes, the toddlers aren't verbal, and that's okay. You want to be very, very careful about saying things like, "What is it?" or, "Oh, I see, it's a blank." Oftentimes, it's not what you think it is, and I've stuck my foot in my mouth more times than I care to admit. In fact, I had a little girl one time that brought her picture up to me and said, "Miss Tasha, Miss Tasha, look at my picture, look what I made!" I said, "Oh my gosh, that's the cutest cow I've ever seen!" And she got this weird look on her face and said, "That's a picture of my daddy." Needless to say, it was a little bit of an awkward situation. So be very careful about assuming that you know what it is, and allow the child to tell you, allow him to dictate to you what the picture was and even the process of how he got there.
5. We want to provide natural items, as children are drawn to items from nature. We don't have to encourage them to explore. A lot of times they do so without direction. This could include simple items such as a leaf paintbrush, a flower paintbrush, using a shell to make prints, or rubbing a leaf. It could even be something as simple as using mud to paint with, using rocks to make prints with or even painting rocks. All of these natural items are great suggestions for how to get the natural pulled into the art.
6. We want to use found items, which are items that are naturally and normally found and seen around the child's environment. This could be something as simple as sponges from the kitchen, utensils from the kitchen like potato mashers, wooden spoons, spatulas, disposable containers that you would have just otherwise thrown away, lids, and even things like balls, blocks, Legos, and cars from their learning center environment. All of those items can be used and incorporated into the art. What I found is that this really helps with bringing those children in that don't tend to go to the art center. I would have boys that would just near refuse to go to art until I started bringing the cars and Legos into art. That really allowed me to be able to draw those children into the art center that might not have otherwise come into.
7. We want to avoid food. Allowing children to play with food and use it in art processes can be very confusing. Since we're working with infants and toddlers and they're still in that oral stage of development, we do want to use things that are considered edible, but not actually use food, such as pasta, yogurt, or pudding. I was guilty of this with my own child, I let her paint with pudding in her high chair because I thought, oh well, she eats it, no big deal. The home situation or the home environment's a little bit different, but in the child care environment, we really want to avoid letting children play with food and especially using food as art. A lot of times as children get older, it does become confusing, as well as we might be serving children where food security is an issue. We really hesitate to instill a kind of thought that food is something that you should play with or that you should waste as far as doing art with it.
8. We want to make sure that we're being patient. Lining babies up in high chairs and putting a smock on them, taking the smock off, "Okay, now it's your turn, okay, now it's my turn, okay, now you're next," that's not creative, and it's really not fun either. You want to let the process happen naturally and let the baby tell you when he's done. Oftentimes in the classroom, it's like, "Oh my gosh, we’ve got to get this art project done” or “Oh, now on the schedule, it's art time, let's everybody come to the table and everybody do their art." Really, that's kind of a rushed process which makes the child feel rushed and it makes the art experience feel rushed. I don't know about you, but when I'm rushed, I'm usually not having fun. Remember, it's all about the experience for the child, so if the experience for the child is rushed, then we know that the art experience probably can't be very fun.
9. You want to provide options. Some children don't like to get their hands or feet messy, so provide other options for them so that they can participate. Back in the day, 15 years ago, when I was working with toddlers, I had a little boy that did not like to do art. He despised anything about art, he did not like Play-Doh, he didn't like playing in sand and water, and we didn't know back then what we know now about sensory processing issues and sensory integration. With what we know now about these types of things, we know it’s important to just be patient and provide options. I would let this child finger paint with a rubber glove on so that he still got to participate. If we did walking painting where we let them step in paint and walk across a big mural piece of paper, I would let him do it with a spare pair of socks on so that he could still participate and feel like he was part of the group, but I didn't force him to do anything that he wasn't comfortable doing. You want to slowly try to encourage these children to try activities where they can feel the art because art is so very much tied to the senses. If they can't feel it, then they're missing some of that, but we don't want to make it to the point where it's a negative experience for the child. There’s a fine line there. You have to know your children well enough to know what's the right thing for them and what's not.
10. Lastly, praise, praise, praise. Sit with the children as they're creating and praise their work, but be specific, celebrate their creativity, and just try new things. Sometimes for a new child, just simply the act of trying something new is a feat.
We want to make sure that the art experience is a positive one. We want to make sure that children feel good about who they are and that they feel good about trying new things. There have been times when I've had young children doing some sort of art experience and they felt like they did it wrong because they got something on their paper where they didn't necessarily want it. We really want to make sure that we're not setting children up to fail, but instead setting them up to succeed and feel like art experiences are fun and that they can be successful at them.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Baby Picasso: Art with Infants and Toddlers, by Natasha Crosby Kile, MS.
