Provide free drawing activities for small groups of children to sit together and chat quietly as they draw. Children enjoy looking at their friends' drawings and often gain ideas and learn techniques from each other. Maintain interest by frequently changing the resources you provide. Cut paper into different shapes, such as circles or triangles, or offer sheets of paper in a variety of colors. Provide sets of felt tip pens to replace customary pencil crayons or wax crayons. Colored chalks look effective on sheets of black paper. Occasional use of plastic templates, for example, animal shapes templates, support hand-eye coordination skills and drawing skills, but do not let children become too reliant on them. Offer structured observational drawing activities for small groups of children, by placing an object, such as a plant, in the center of the table. Encourage children to observe closely and draw what they see by using a range of art media, such as pencils or oil pastels.
Set up free painting activities with easels, large sheets of painting paper, paintbrushes, water, palettes and a limited selection of poster paint or powder paint colors, such as red, blue, yellow and white. Regularly teach children how to mix colors, for example by mixing red and white to produce pink. Show children how to clean equipment and where to store it, and offer a suitable area for drying their finished paintings. Encourage children's emotional engagement with their artwork by offering starting points for painting activities. Provide structured painting activities, such as potato printing or finger painting. Use printing activities to teach math concepts, such as repeating patterns with colors, such as a red-blue-red-blue repeating pattern.
Early years teacher, Monica Dalmia of Michigan State University, suggests asking the children to think about their favorite activities during a particular season, for example, summer. Listen to the children's ideas and prompt them to think about warm weather, the type of clothing they wear and the places that they visit during summer months. Take the children into a large movement space, play some fast music and let them move how they wish. When you stop the music they should become still and wait for your signal to mime their imagined summer activity. Stimulate children's imaginations and creative movement potential with other seasonal movement or celebratory prompts, such as Thanksgiving or birthdays.
Linda Mort suggests a creative play activity called Wriggle and Tickle that she describes in her book, "Circle Time." Give a sock to each child in the circle and place the children into pairs. Encourage the children to pretend their sock is a garden worm and to mirror each other's movements as you say the rhyme: "Round and round the garden, worms go everywhere; one wriggle, two wriggle, tickle you under there!" On the last line, the children can gently tickle each other with their "worm." Offer further creative challenge to the children by enabling pairs of children to play with their puppets in the sand tray. Ask them to make up a simple story about two worms that have an adventure in the garden and to retell it to the group at your next circle time.