Home Hot Topics Articles About Us / Contact Us Activities & Curriculum Activities for Outcome-Based Learning Arts & Crafts Music for Learning Recommended Reading NEWSlink Topics In Early Childhood Education Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education The Reading Corner Teaching Children with Special Needs The Teachers’ Lounge Teacher QuickSource® Professional Development by Discount School Supply® Job Sharing Board State Licensing Requirements ProSolutions CEUs Subscribe today to our bi-weekly newsletter!   The Foundation of Art is Play By Susan Thompson "I'm not an artist," is a common comment I hear from students just entering my methods course. When they leave at the end of the semester, they realize that involving young children in the process of playing with art media as they express their feelings, ideas, and experiences is the beginning of a lifelong understanding, interest, and love of art. It is the knowledge learned through this play process that children carry with them into adulthood.The art course is part of an integrated course which also includes music, social studies, and movement education. The students attend class and also then spend time in public school classrooms, assisting the teachers and teaching integrated lessons in small and large groups. Last semester a student taught a lesson on Brahms to first graders. She read the children a book that told about Brahms' Lullaby and played music to go with the book. When she brought some of the paintings to our class, she expressed her dismay. "The children really didn't connect the painting to the book. They just wanted to paint different colors and see how the colors mixed."I asked her to think about why that might have happened. She responded that the children had no prior experience with painting, and they wanted to explore and discover what the paints were like and what they could do with them.This orientation to new materials can be compared to an example of a boy who approaches a large wooden car in Catherine Garvey's book Play. "(a) He paused, inspected it, and touched it. (b) He then tried to find our what it could do. (c) Having figured out what the object was and what it could do, he got to work on what he could do with it.... Finally, the car was understood, its properties and immediate usefulness reasonably clear. (d) He then climbed on it and drove furiously back and forth with suitable motor and horn noises" (p. 47). Or in our case, we can begin to paint a subject only after we have learned about the medium. Paints, clay, yarn, natural materials, and other media present exciting opportunities for children. An elementary social studies curriculum usually starts with having a child learn about himself or herself in kindergarten, and gradually broadens to encompass the world by grade six. The progression in an elementary art curriculum is different. It starts with a very broad range of exploration and experimentation with many materials, and then introduces and builds on more specific skills and concepts as a child develops. This progression in art fits well with how children develop. A young child will play with a lump of clay for endless time, pressing and kneading the pliable material. How many times have you seen a young child painting--engaged and enthralled by the colors as he or she puts the brush in the paint and then makes strokes up and down on a piece of paper, with little thought of what he or she is "creating"? When a child is comfortable with the exploration and the medium through play, then he or she may be ready to be directed into a more structured activity such as painting images from Brahms' Lullaby.Last year a kindergarten teacher and I introduced Van Gogh to her class by telling them about his life and showing them prints of his paintings while discussing his painting methods. The children noticed immediately that he used short strokes and applied the paint thickly. We then gave the children brushes and finger paints so they could try short strokes with thick paint like Van Gogh. Shifting emphasis from a subject to playing with a technique allowed the children to freely experiment and discover, and the children were very engaged in the activity.I saw this same engagement with sixth graders as I observed a college student teaching a lesson on illustrating a book. She set up centers which provided the children many different opportunities for illustrating, such as gadget printing, blowing paint with straws, and making collages with various materials. The children were thoroughly involved in the activity for almost two hours! "I don't know if many of them actually illustrated their stories," the student commented. "But they sure learned and discovered a lot through playing with all the materials." Her original objective may not have met by every child, but the process was certainly very valuable in terms of learning.In closing, I would like the reader to think about this: if I gave you a lump of clay, what would you do?ReferenceGarvey, C. (1990). Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. This article was taken from Play, Policy, & Practice Connections, the newsletter of the Play, Policy & Practice Caucus of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. 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