Teaching Children to Express Themselves with Art

"Hi, I am Pam on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to teach you how to bring fundamentals home from school. Art is a natural way for kids to express their feelings and emotions. Their thoughts and feelings are going to affect the way they draw, the colors they choose, the textures. You might think its funny, but a kid who is feeling angry or upset is more likely to choose the color red than someone who's just happy and fine, who may choose the color blue. By tearing and cutting up paper, they are refining their small muscle skills. They are also doing that by coloring lines, drawing shapes. They use cognitive development and thinking through planning, organizing, selecting what media, and how they want to represent their lines. They make choices, try out ideas, plans. Now, some things you can do. Make things with them. Sit down. Do art projects together. A great thing to do is make your own play-dough. It's easy, it's usually made with things you can find around the house. You can change the color of it for the different seasons. They are going to develop their vocabulary, because they will be using new words relating to their art, like 'sculpt', 'palette'; things that they haven't already heard before."