Painting with a paintbrush is fun, but painting with your fingers or feathers is even more fun. Provide preschoolers with a variety of common household and classroom objects and let them discover ways to use them as paintbrushes. Provide brushes, pipe cleaners, empty toilet paper tubes and wooden craft sticks for children to use for painting on paper. Food can also be used for painting. Pass out apple halves or cooked pieces of spaghetti, but remind preschoolers that these items are to be used for painting and not eating.
Learning how colors are made gives preschoolers an introduction to science, and watching new colors be formed will seem like magic. Pass out individual bowls of red, yellow and blue paint along with empty bowls and ask children to make new colors of paint by mixing small amounts of the primary colors together. Once they have used their new colors to create pictures on white paper, pass out colored paper so they can see what happens when they combine various shades of paint with different colors of paper.
Preschoolers are likely to get paint on multiple surfaces, so you might as well endorse the idea by passing out various types of materials to use as canvasses. Let children paint on pieces of cardboard, tissue paper and newspaper in addition to plain sheets of white paper. They should also enjoy painting on kitchen items such as aluminum foil, waxed paper and plastic wrap. Ask preschoolers to compare which surfaces were the easiest to paint on and which were the most difficult.
Adding water to painting projects requires no special equipment and it changes the results of a preschooler’s art project instantly. Invite children to dip paintbrushes in water before dipping them in paint, or mix different amounts of water into small bowls of paint so children can see what happens when they layer thinner, lighter-colored paints together. When the weather is warm, take your brushes and paints outside and let kids paint all over a white sheet. When the paint dries, hose off the sheet and let preschoolers paint it again while it’s wet to see the difference.