Learning with Easels and Paints

Mums and dads the whole world over know full well that children love getting dirty: puddles will be jumped in; water will be splashed; mud will be piled up or thrown about; worms and creepy crawlies will be examined (and occasionally eaten); and food is as likely to find its way onto the floor or all over hands and faces as it is to find its way into a mouth. As mucky and messy as they are, children are naturally inquisitive and love experimenting with whatever comes to hand. WoodenToyShop’s selection of children’s easels and easel accessories offers parents and carers a way to channel children’s energy and enthusiasm into educational and developmental play while satisfying those undeniable juvenile demands to make a mess.

  

Lots of us will remember taking one of Daddy’s old shirts into nursery or to school where we would put it on backwards to keep our clothes or uniforms free from paint or chalk. Standing at an easel was a huge treat in school and painting a picture of your family and house is a rite of passage for many children. Of course, while children are happy to ‘play’, grownups should be aware of the many benefits of artistic play. Starting with a simple paintbrush, piece of chalk or magic marker pen, all of these help children develop and improve fine motor skills: in this case, learning to grip and use ‘tools’ is an essential life skill that we all take for granted.

Having selected their preferred tool, children then have the choice of which colour to paint, chalk or mark. Colours play such an important role in our lives and colour is one of the earliest aspects of life and the world around us that children learn. This helps them to distinguish and categorise the world around them. It helps them with communication and language – colour is a very useful tool for identifying describing objects, for example. Similarly, painting or drawing different shapes gives children another option for understanding and describing the objects around them.

Of course, creative and unstructured play like this encourages children to use their young imaginations and develop a sense of their own personalities: the things that they draw and paint can reflect their interests, even at an early age. This kind of play also allows children to work through and express some of the things in their lives that matter to them or are bothering them, all in a relaxed and open environment.

As children grow older, they can use easels, white boards and chalk boards to learn numbers and letters and basic spelling and mathematics. Given the space of a magnetic board rather than a page in an exercise book, children can be more relaxed about forming letters and numbers and this early play can be useful to give them a head start in more formal education.

It seems a shame that so many of us put down our paint brushes when we leave school and never go back to an easel or sketch book. The benefits and enjoyment of such a simple activity should be enjoyed by us grownups as well as our little angels.

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