15 of the All-Time Best Art Activities for Preschoolers

Featured by Twinkl in World Art Day Blog 

Looking for easy art activities for preschoolers to do at home or at school?

The best way to get young children learning while doing art is to let them experiment with art materials and tools freely.

A search for ‘art activities for preschoolers’ on Pinterest or Google will yield thousands upon thousands of results of gorgeous-looking, fancy arts and crafts projects.

This is not that kind of article. I’d like to give you some ideas of simple, everyday, real art activities – the kind your kids will really learn from and the kind that don’t always look so fancy.

Why Is Creative Art Important For Preschoolers?

Art is beneficial for children’s development in many ways:

• It builds fine motor skills.
• It develops pencil grip and pre-writing skills.
• It teaches children how to plan on paper.
• Art develops visual perception.
• It helps children to express ideas and concepts.
• The process of doing creative art strengthens kids’ attention spans.
• Art often involves problem solving.

Read more about the benefits of art for children.

15 Creative Art Activities For Preschoolers

Here are some really basic and easy creative art ideas for kids that you can do at home or school, with little prep.

Some are completely child led and some require you to guide slightly, but all are great open-ended art activities for preschoolers that will encourage creativity.

These arts and crafts ideas are perfect for preschool-aged children as well as children in kindergarten/reception year and even beyond.

Change them to suit you, interpret them your own way or use different materials and tools.

1. Straw Painting

Straw painting can be done by splattering paint or blowing paint. Simply pick up some paint in a straw and splatter it onto the paper or put a drop of paint onto the paper and blow through the straw to make the paint spread out.

Either way, the effect is quite cool.

2. Finger Painting

Finger paint can be bought or made at home with simple ingredients. Here are some finger paint recipes to try (some are edible).

Offer your children large pieces of paper and let them go wild with the paint, with no directions. This is a great tactile experience and will work those finger muscles.

3. Colour Collage

Offer magazines and sheets of white paper and ask your kids to make a colour collage with only one specific colour. They can cover their whole page by cutting out or tearing bits of paper that they find in the magazine.

Tearing and cutting are both important skills that some children struggle to master and therefore requires lots of practice.

4. Leaf Printing

Choose a variety of leaves of different shapes from the park or garden. Paint the leaves with a large paintbrush and then print them onto white paper.

It takes a lot of coordination to hold the leaves and carefully turn them over to print them. Again, let your children decide how many leaves to use, what colours to use, and how to print them.

Remember to chat about the pattern that the veins of the leaves creates.

5. Potato Printing

Potato printing is one of my favourites. If you have some potatoes that are starting to get soft, cut them in half and cut some simple patterns into them or leave them in their natural oval shape.

Then, dip the potatoes in a tray of paint and print them onto paper. Easy peasy.

6. Box Construction

When I taught preschool, I had a large laundry basket in my class filled with toilet rolls, cereal boxes, used tin foil and other waste materials from the children’s homes.

For this activity, you just have to trust. Make scissors, tape, glue and a variety of boxes available and see what your kids come up with. I have seen some pretty elaborate constructions happening when I left children to their own devices.

7. Shape Picture

Cut out different shapes from coloured paper and then use the shapes to create a picture. Try not to give directions and see what your children create.

You might get a train made from rectangles and circles, a house, an animal or a person.

They will need crayons to add details – such as arms on the side of the square body, or eyebrows above the eyes.

8. Bubble Picture

For this activity, you’ll need a bowl of water with dishwashing liquid and some paint or food colouring.

Ask your child to blow into the water with a straw and then turn the paper down onto the bubbles to catch them on the paper. This looks really cool!

9. Drawing an Object

There is one way you can teach your children to draw and that is to look at detail. Instead of telling your children to draw a house with a square and a triangle on top, sit on the grass and really draw your house by looking at it, describing the shapes and colours.

You may want to start with a smaller object such as drawing a plant.

I have seen 4-year-old children draw the most amazing pictures when encouraged to draw what they see and look carefully at the object. All they need is paper, a led pencil and an eraser.

10. Nature Collage

Making a nature collage is fun because you get to go on a walk in the park or garden and collect all kinds of natural collage materials – leaves, twigs, grass, flowers, etc.

All your kids need is some glue and paper to create an awesome nature collage.

11. Sponge Printing

Use old bath sponges for this art. Either keep their shapes as they are or cut shapes out of them. Dip them in paint, or watercolours, and print onto paper.

12. Free Drawing or Painting

Free drawing is an important activity that children should have time for every day. As long as your children have paper and a variety of drawing tools – pencils, wax crayons, markers, chalk – they can be given complete freedom when drawing.

With time, the scribbles turn into recognizable shapes and images and later into intricate pictures filled with details. Drawing is the most basic of art activities and where creativity begins.

Children need lots of time to draw freely in order to progress through the stages of drawing.

The same applies to painting, which is a great art activity that kids should be exposed to often. Allow kids lots of time to paint freely with different sized brushes and different types of paint.

13. Drawing Portraits

Sit opposite your child, or get children to sit opposite each other in pairs, and sketch each other’s portraits with just a pencil.

Have a discussion before beginning about the features on your face, the colour and shape of your eyes, the length of your hair, etc.

14. Rock Painting

Find some well-sized rocks and paint them with thin paintbrushes. The thinner the brush, the more detail can be painted on.

Younger children can be given a thicker paintbrush if they want to cover the entire rock. Older children could even paint the rock one colour, and then add the detail with a smaller brush once it dries.

Keep these as paperweights.

When it comes to painting, the ideas are endless. You could even try painting with balls.

15. Cutting and Sticking

With all the ready-made craft ideas out there, children seldom spend enough time just cutting and sticking freely. These are two important skills that need regular practice.

Let your kids create freely with scissors, glue and different types of paper – tissue paper, cardboard, newspaper, regular coloured paper, etc.

And there you have it – a bunch of really simple but educational easy preschool art activities.