Name of Activity:. Straw Paintings

Category:. Art Smart

Props: Straws, water color paints, paint brushes, water, smocks, blank 12 x 18 pieces of paper, newspaper

Your Role: Coach and model

Directions: Model for your child how to blow air through a straw. Practice blowing at the paper on the table. You may even want to rip up scraps of newspaper and have your child blow the scraps using the straw. Now open the paintbox, put water into the paints and place one small blob of one color onto the piece of paper. Ask your child to use the straw to blow the paint across the paper. Place a second blob of a different color on the paper (not near the other blob) and ask your child to blow it. The same with a third color. Close the paintbox and ask the child to tell you want the three blobs of paint remind him of. Try to get as detailed a response as possible. (Remember, when you put the blobs of paint on the paper, try to place them far enough apart on the paper so that the child will not blow the into one another.)

Goals for You: Your job is to get children excited about using art materials in ways that help them develop small motor skills and large imagination ones!

Goals for Children: To control art materials and to use here-and-now stimuli to help recall memory images and construct imagination images, and use both of these to stimulate story making.

Possible Strategy:

What to say "Today we are going to make designs on paper and figure out what they look like. First I want you to blow through this straw. Let's rip up some little pieces of paper, put them in a pile and blow. See how the scraps move? Do you think you can really control the way the paper moves?"

What to do Help your child gain control of the airflow and understand that he or she can really make things move the way he/she wants.

Possible Shaping:

What to say "Now I'm going to ask you to blow the same way, but this time I am going to put a blob of paint on this paper and make it move. What color would you like? How would you like it to move? Great job. Now what do you think this blob looks like? Tell me about it." (It's very important that you help your child look at the here-and-now blob and use his/her imagination to connect it to an image of something s/he has seen before or something that s/he creates.)

Here are some other coaching techniques: It is very important to have a ritual to help your child get into the appropriate creative frame of mind. You may model for the child "Here is what I do. I shut my eyes. I think hard. I look for a picture in my head. And then all of a sudden I know what the story is." You can help the child shut his/her eyes, put his/her fingers to his/her temple and then open his/her eyes briefly to look at the blob again. You can suggest that this is how famous artists and famous artists and famous writers get their inspiration. Say "I learned this technique from a famous artist. This is how she gets her images for the things that she paints."

What to do: Encourage the child. Coach to help them figure out what the shape looks like. Once your child has figured out what the shape looks like, ask him/her to tell you a little story about it. You may have to model a beginning line. You may have to help the tale continue or you may have to help structure an ending. Make sure that you write down every word that your child says. Do the same thing with the second blob that the child blows. That is, help the child make up a separate story about the second blob. Then do the same thing with the third blob that the child blows (help the child make up a story about just the third blob.) . Finally, you may want to ask the child if s/he wants to write another story that includes all 3 blobs in the same story.

Possible Ending:

What to say: "Great job . I love your blob picture and story."

What to do: Write down what they say and mark blob title near blob.

Material on this site created by Helane S. Rosenberg, Ph.D. and Yakov M. Epstein, Ph.D. in conjunction with their forthcoming book titled Play for Success. All material on this site is copyrighted and may not be reproduced or cited without written permission of Helane S. Rosenberg, Ph.D.. Dr. Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education of Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Epstein is Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Science of Rutgers-The State University, New Brunswick, NJ. He is also Director of the Center for Mathematics, Science, and Computer Education of Rutgers University.

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