Supermom and actress Judy Ann Santos-Agoncillo recently shared a photo of her youngest daughter, Luna’s painting. The painting features an elephant under a tree against a colorful background. Luna’s fine motor skills are evident in the artwork, as she was able to create straight boundaries and realistic silhouettes.
Exposing toddlers such as Luna to arts such as painting has a lot of advantages in terms of their learning and development. Aside from painting, other visual arts that can interest toddlers are drawing or coloring pictures, finger-painting, and folding or cutting papers, among others. All of these activities allow toddlers to:
- Exercise and develop all kinds of fine motor skills as they keep their feet on the ground while painting and ensure a good grasp of a paintbrush, crayons, papers, or scissors.
- Boost their hand-eye coordination as they paint or color the parts of their artwork, ensuring that their hand movement executes the points or parts that they intend to paint or color.
- Stimulate their senses as they get exposed to different textures such as paint, colors, and smooth, glossy, or textured papers.
- Encourage their creativity and express their thoughts or ideas. Painting is another way of communicating their feelings or emotions.
- Visual art is a good activity for toddlers as they are highly interested in learning about colors, shapes, and lines. They are in a stage of exploring their capability in visual arts and just simply playing with all the colors, shapes, and lines that they are continuously learning.
- Their doodles, random dots and swipes, and messy finger/hand prints may seem just plain mess in the eyes of the adults but they are masterpieces of these young artists. A dot may be a house for them or a line may be an elephant for them.
Some toddlers may express interest in doing these activities, while some may not. The important thing is to provide a stimulating environment that would encourage their creativity. A child may simply create a line or drop a paint. Just let them. It may seem unfinished, but what’s important is they were allowed to explore and express himself or herself through art.
References: Raising Children, Kids U
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