What parent or carer’s fridge is complete without lovingly made pieces of art?
As adorable as toddler self-portraits are, there’s much more to early years arts and crafts than making things to take home.
In this blog, we explore the important role of creative arts at nursery so you can understand just how essential it is to your child’s development.
Expressive Arts & Design In the Early Years
Creative arts are a key aspect of your child’s early years experience and engage their imagination through a combination of art, dance, drama, music, and puppetry. Activities foster ways of thinking that will support your child as they grow, such as the value of mess and experimentation, the removal of fear from creativity and the art of perseverance.
Early years creative arts are split into 3 categories…
Imagination And Creativity
This section focuses on building confidence in creativity and resourcefulness. How a child responds to external stimuli like materials and experiences inspires their imagination and creativity. These skills lend themselves to storytelling, better managing their emotions and relating to others.
Self-Expression
Through creativity and unstructured play with open-ended materials, children are enabled to use their imagination, develop their thinking processes and begin to express themselves without the need for language.
Communicating Through Arts
Art allows children to express themselves and share their experiences. Communicating through creative arts reduces worries and anxiety and supports healthy emotional development.
Wondering what the Early Years Foundation Stage (“EYFS”) framework says about creative arts at nursery? Here are the headlines:
- Regular opportunities to engage with creative arts are crucial.
- Nursery settings should provide a variety of quality art resources and opportunities for children.
- Frequency, repetition and depth of experience are key to cementing children’s progress in their understanding as well as self-expression and language development.
Exploring EYFS through Creative Arts
Creative and expressive arts can be used to support all areas of development. Let’s explore how.
Communication
Communicating through art can heavily support children with English as an additional language or children who have limited verbal communication skills to express themselves and interact with others meaningfully.
Singing, story-telling and role play are all creative activities that help to develop language. Here are some examples of how a nursery might provide opportunities for engagement:
- Making puppets and performing a puppet show
- Singing nursery rhymes
- Exploring musical instruments and making music together
- Putting different types of music on to move to.
Physical
Dance and movement are particular arts-inspired activities that help to develop both gross and fine motor skills.
The development of gross motor skills such as balance, coordination, strength and proprioception are supported through the different movements bodies make as they explore dance. Examples of fine motor skills that are learnt through movement include the synchronisation of hands with eyes, and the ability to control small muscles during dancing; these fine motor skills work well to prepare your child’s body for learning to write at school.
Gross Motor
As well as dance and movement, games involving making shapes with the body work well to introduce gross motor skill practice. Copying the shape of inanimate objects or animals, for example, marries gross motor and language skills.
Playing musical instruments or using household objects to make sounds, like saucepans, wooden spoons and plastic tubs, is another fantastic way of incorporating big body movements and coordination into the nursery day.
Fine Motor
There are a ton of creative arts activities that nurseries can introduce daily to support the development of fine motor skills. Fine motor skills describe our ability to manipulate the small muscles in our hands and wrists to execute focused tasks. Children need to be supported in developing these skills as we rely on them to do key tasks in everyday life.
Here are some ideas.
- Making junk models
- Manipulating play-doh to make shapes
- Threading beads
- Using pipettes, pegs or tweezers to practice squeezing
- Drawing with traditional materials, or with sticks in mud or fingers in salt or sand
- Playing with small spinning tops to practice twisting skills.
Social & Emotional
Working together through creative arts-inspired activities helps children practice communicating with their peers. Arts activities also present opportunities to explore feelings when things don’t go to plan, for example when the paint smudges or the outcome doesn’t match the expectation.
Not sure how to talk about this aspect of creative arts? How about…
- Drawing each other
- Drama-based games and roleplaying to promote cooperation
- Unexpected art. Try making a picture from random blobs, smudges or splatters.
Literacy
Creative arts doesn’t just refer to messy painting and tactile sculpture-making. It can foster an early love of storytelling, reading and books.
A great activity that incorporates literacy skills is story-making. Think up an idea for a story, take time to draw the characters and the setting and encourage cooperative acting out of the storyline.
Maths
Maths goes hand in hand with creativity, and creative arts can help to make maths more engaging - for the adults as well as the children! Art helps children to explore and comprehend concepts like size, shapes, counting, comparing objects, measuring and spatial reasoning.
Here are a few examples of creative maths-inspired activities:
- Making repeating patterns with loose parts
- Building towers and structures
- Counting during play. Practitioners can encourage children to count as they explore.
And for outdoor play, try these ideas…
- Stone stacking
- Nature hunt. Ask the children to search for a particular number of natural objects, like pinecones or acorns.
- Hopscotch
- Using chalk to mark-make on the floor
- Numbered cars and parking spaces.
Messy Play & Open-Ended Exploration
Not all activities need structure and a finish point. Self-directed, open-ended sensory play breeds curiosity and creativity and should be integrated into much of the nursery day where possible.
Limited instruction, leaving plenty of room for self-guided exploration, lets children discover things they may not have touched on under adult guidance.
Need some inspiration? What about…
- Water play. Set up a few large tubs of water in your outside space along with funnels, hollow tubes and scoops and see what happens.
- Play-Doh or airdry clay. With these resources, the possibilities are truly endless. Refrain from directing the children to ‘make’ anything; an end product is not the goal.
- Paint. Rather than aiming for a work of art to take home and stick on the fridge, focus on the process. How does the paint feel to touch? Lay out a selection of random objects alongside the paint invitation and watch the children explore the art material without rules.
- Mud. Children have a superhuman ability to discover mud in any location, but you can encourage this activity!
Creative Arts At Home
Creative arts aren’t just for nursery… Parents and carers can join in the fun, too.
Some of you will have just recoiled in horror at the thought, but art doesn’t have to be messy. Simplicity is key.
For example…
- Colouring pictures together brings in fine motor skills to stay inside the lines and explores different media, such as pens, pencils and chalk.
- Simple sensory play, like moon sand, is fun and easy to make (as well as clear away). Moon sand can be put together using just corn flour and baby oil.
- Preparing food, cooking and baking together is a great connection activity. Decorating a pizza or cake or making a colourful wrap to eat explores patterns, colour and measuring. This is creativity that doesn’t focus on arts and crafts as we know it.
Creative Arts Bolster Healthy Early Years Development
Integrating creative arts is key to early years development, and Hopes & Dreams nurseries embrace all opportunities to use it in the daily running of our settings.
Intrigued? Visit our nursery settings to learn more about our early years provision. We look forward to meeting you!
As you can see, creative arts help support all areas of your child’s development, including fine motor skills. For more about improving your toddler’s fine motor skills, click here.
