According to Scholastic, two things children should leave preschool knowing are how to identify the primary colors -- red, blue and yellow -- and how to mix two colors to create a third color. For instance, they should learn that mixing primary colors yellow and blue produces the secondary color green. Art activities for color knowledge can include color identification games and activities in which preschoolers have to create colors by mixing primary paint colors together in egg crates.
Part of learning about art includes understanding themes. A theme influences what the artist creates by setting the tone for the art piece. Through art activities, preschoolers can practice how to create various types of art based on specific themes. For instance, if you give your students a sad theme, they might incorporate lots of blue and purple colors, whereas a cheery theme would inspire them to use bright yellows and oranges. Another theme project idea is to give preschoolers a word, such as Nature or Desert and see how they interpret the theme through their artistic creations. They might use a lot of green colors with a Nature theme, and a lot of browns for a Desert theme.
You can teach preschoolers about particular moments in history through art activities. For instance, if you are teaching preschoolers about how Thanksgiving started, you can have them color in images of pilgrims or make paper turkeys by tracing their hands. You can teach preschoolers about how the Native Americans used to live by having them construct miniature teepees out of wooden sticks and paper.
At the Greenleaf Friends Academy, one of the art goals for preschoolers is for the kids to learn about different varieties of art media. Preschool art activities should expose students to to drawing, painting, working with clay, making collages and gluing objects onto pictures. Students learn what the various media are and experiment with combining them.
One of the objectives of preschool art activities should be for students to express themselves and not just copy what other students are doing. Self-expression is important in building character and identity and learning to represent an inner feeling creatively. For an art activity, you can play music in the background, such as Mozart, and tell students to draw what they feel from the music or you can have them think about something that makes them happy -- or sad, or scared -- and draw a picture of it.