One of our kitchen cabinets has been designated "The Art Cabinet"! It houses fingerpaints, Playdoh, markers/crayons/colored pencils, scissors & glue, all of our art supplies. Why? Because at this stage with little ones, doing these kinds of activities at our kitchen table seems to be the easiest thing.
While many of these supplies are kept out of reach, some of them have been made easily accessible to little hands.
One of the things that I always have available for them is what we call their "Paper Bucket".
The Paper Bucket is full of all kinds of random things that my little ones enjoy using for "free art". There are no rules. They are free to cut and glue and cut and glue and cut and glue...creating anything they like - using the items in their Paper Bucket.
For my oldest, I hand him age-appropriate scissors and a glue stick and he goes to town with the goodies in this bucket.
I have included some of the random things that can been found in their art box at any given time:
Calendar Pages
A Variety of Magazines
These cats resulted in lots of fun....see how this works?
Blank Scrap Paper, Tissue Paper, All Different Kinds of Paper
The Sunday Comics
Grocery Store Ads are perfect for this as well!
Construction Paper
Sheets of Foam
Coloring Books
Activity Booklets
Notebook Paper
Graph Paper
Pretty Much Anything
Other items I include as I come across them:
stickers
advertisements
other various pieces of junk mail
paper plates
bubble wrap
pieces of cardboard
The inside of our box is typically a mess...but it is a contained mess. With one big bucket to house everything, it makes for easy clean-up for little hands. Every so often, I go through and rid out anything that has clearly been used as much as it can possibly be used.
I try to keep things simple. I don't include glitter, pipe cleaners, pony beads, googly eyes, or other type of art supply - the goal with this activity is to stick with [mostly] paper - requiring kiddos to use their imagination as much as possible.
**Classroom Teachers: When I was teaching in the elementary classroom, this worked great as an independent as well as peer-to-peer learning center.**
For more hands-on ideas for the classroom (or homeschool environment), check out:
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