Are They Too Young

Parents often ask us if their children are too young to start painting or sketching classes. Here is what we have found from observing our best art instructors with kids. Just like mixing colors provide endless possibilities, children experimenting with art learn they can create different experiences with it.

Most of the time we see that kids get enrolled in art classes to fill up a schedule or to engage them during a holiday season. Often though, parents discover new things about their kids by the end of the course.

Kids who were reticent and shy tend to share their emotions through colors or drawings and parents find that moods are captured more succinctly than spoken. Correctly being able to identify colors is an important milestone in childhood that comes even before reading skills.

Our trainers use different techniques to help children understand the range of colors possible. Making a color collage of paper scraps in monochrome, sorting beads and buttons into groups, incorporating shapes into colors and using games to mix and match colors help children understand there are many ways to solve puzzles.

While guiding children in technique and skill, our trainers allow children to develop and come up with their own ideas. They avoid giving kids coloring books to paint on, patterns to copy or telling children what to draw.  

Our best trainers present art materials to children and let them explore ways to use them. They also offer the possibility for children to work with different media. Paper, paint, blocks and beads. What they do with it is important, not what is made.

By understanding that there are more than one outcomes children learn to find their own solutions. Children learn to wonder why and how instead of following guidelines and rules when they work on art projects. This is the stepping stone to problem solving skills.

A very important concept good trainers inculcate in children is helping them know the importance of the process and not in the final product. Reproducing a tidy sketched out landscape with green trees and blue skies are not as important as allowing the child to draw from imagination, a countryside cottage.

With art they learn to explore, discover and experiment. The idea is not to create a masterpiece or  conform to any particular technique. When allowed a free-thinking environment, parents are surprised at the ingenious ideas their children come up with. After all imagination is what got some children to invent some pretty useful things including the trampoline, swimming flippers or ear muffs.

Cutting out crafts, shaping modelling clay and painting with delicate strokes help define a child’s motor skills. Trainers say this is a skill that is absolutely needed in today’s environment where children swipe more than write. Parents who have kids enrolled in sketching classes agree the difference is visible enough.

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