I want to share 7 Benefits to why it’s good to set toddlers up with painting activities at home or in the classroom. Young children love painting and find this activity fun and exciting once they try it out. But did you know art has amazing benefits for early childhood brain development!
What is Toddler Painting?
Toddler painting is about making brushstroke marks with a paintbrush, hands, sponges, paint rollers or stampers. Brushstrokes are made with liquid pigmented color called paint. The action of making a brushstroke with paint is called painting.
7 Benefits For Brain Development
I’ve come to understand how painting activities can benefit a toddlers brain development. Toddlers can make connections to important learning milestones while painting. Here are 7 important key points I’ve discovered over the past couple decades in my studio observations.
1. Painting builds hand and eye muscle coordination
A toddler can achieve fine-motor control by learning to make paint brushstrokes with their hands. By showing young students—even as young as one or two years—how to use a paintbrush, you’re helping them reach critical milestones that are directly related to other areas of childhood development.
2. Painting Builds Vocabulary (Art Language)
Painting activities teach toddlers how to communicate what they see in their artworks, as well as how to describe their process. More than likely, their inquisitive little minds will start making connections (like, “if I use this color paint, this paint brush, it’ll come out like this”), and they’ll probably start asking questions (such as, “what color is this?” or “why did this do this?”). Read more about art language here.
3. Painting Is Calming and Relaxing
Toddlers using their hands to paint can be so engaged that other stress-related thoughts clear their minds. The electrical activity stimulated in the brain becomes a different type of action, firing connections that allow children to focus only on their creating process. A calming effect takes place because tactile cognitive processing is occurring while children make painting marks with their hands.
4. Painting Builds Cognitive Memory
Learning to paint builds implied memory with repeated movements of loading a paintbrush, and making a brushstroke. When a child touches an object, the information is sent through the sensory nerves in their fingers to their brain.
5. Painting Develops Toddler Spatial Intelligence
Toddlers gain spatial intelligence from creating shapes in space. They become aware of spatial relations among objects in the realm of their own experiences, giving them the ability to mentally visualize, manipulate elements, rotate objects, and distinguish depth with balance. Which is critical in early childhood brain development.
6. Painting Is Sensory and Tactile
When a child touches an object, messages of information are sent through sensory nerves to the brain. Tactile sensory experiences can help toddlers learn and understand ideas. Visual art learning can happen from direct sensory touching by hands. Tactile painting activities stimulates learning in different ways than visual or audio learning.
7. Toddler Painting Activities Build Concentration
As toddlers start getting used to touching mediums, understanding what’s happening, and seeing things unfold, it sparks their curiosity and they become eager to start exploring. They will also come to know why the materials are out and what to do with them. Once a child understands what is happening in the actions of painting, they become more interested, and concentration levels start to last longer.
These 7 benefits for brain development just scratching the surface, painting activities can provide so many other positive learning benefits.
Bring Art Programming Into Your Classroom!
I’ve spent decades observing how children learn art. If you’re intrigued about Painting with toddlers and want to dive deeper on the subject, you can check out my books, videos, online training courses, and live workshops:
Painting Key Lessons 101 – Online Video Training
Spramani Elaun trains teachers and parents Internationally how to teach kids art. Spramani’s also a mom of two, author, artist and founder of Nature of Art® Art School (Science Art Method) & Online Art Supply company from San Diego, California. Visit Nature of Art® @ www.EcoKidsArt & www.Montessori-Art.com
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