Art in the Toddler Classroom

Art is a sensorial experience, especially for toddlers. They can touch the bristles on the paint brush to see if they are soft or prickly. They can see how colors blend together to make new colors.

Toddlers work on their motor skills while creating art. A toddler learns how to hold the paintbrush and how to spread the paint on the paper. The act of creating art also introduces new words into their developing vocabularies.

Cognitive development also is at work when a toddler is creating art. They learn, for example, if they press harder on the crayon, then the color may get darker on the paper.

All of these things make the process of creating art much more important than what the final piece of art looks like. The process of creating art is unstructured in the toddler environment, and a toddler is not worried about the final outcome of the work.

We try not to praise the end result of their art sessions, but we comment on things such as the colors they used or how hard they worked on their art. We want to encourage their intrinsic motivation to do the work for themselves and not for others.

Classroom Themes

As the temperature gets cooler, we are focusing on the color yellow, such as yellow apples. Our number this month is 3.

Food Prep

We have incorporated lots of food prep! Cutting apples, bananas, and peeling oranges are all works on the shelf for the child to do all by him or herself!

Song

There’s a train & it rides through the town and the countryside & where it goes nobody knows but it always comes back home.

The conductor says “all aboard”

(Repeat chorus)
The ticket master says “tickets please, tickets please
The conductor says “all aboard”
Repeat chorus
The wheels on the train go chugga chugga
The ticket master says “tickets please, tickets please”
(Repeat chorus)