The beauty of cardboard and process art is that anything & everything can be used as a canvas or morphed into something creative. Cardboard is such a versatile material that provides a great surface to paint on. Since it comes in so many different sizes, textures, & shapes it allows the children to explore art in a different medium, use their imagination to think of a range of ways to paint cardboard boxes, & promotes collaboration as the children can work together to paint & talk about what they are creating.
Since the children were excited for Christmas we decided to honor their current interests & invite them to decorate a cardboard gingerbread house with a whole bunch of art materials from Discount School Supply ! This inspired so much excitement and engagement as the children transformed & reinvented these boxes into something magical!
When we provide opportunities for a child to create freely with a wide range of materials in an open ended way, it will further help build their social emotional development. Creating with no restrictions yields positive results. Research tells us that children who participate in arts over an extended period of time show more sophisticated social skills such as sharing & cooperation, reduced shyness and anxiety, & reduced aggressive behavior. Children who engage in arts regularly are better able to control their emotions & express them in productive ways.
Since the social emotional development of a child is the foundation to support all of the other domains when a child feels empowered & confident through creating/exploring art they will also enhance their fine & gross motor development, hand-eye coordination & control, openness to experiment/take risks with tools provided, further develop their language as they express what they are doing in the process, & continue to have the avenue of using their most powerful capability creativity + imagination.
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