There isn't just one perfect way to teach and support young children in the visual arts, and different people have different ideas on the best approach. This is because there are ongoing discussions about how children develop their visual art skills. It's important to think about your own experiences and views on the visual arts, your background, how visual arts are seen in your culture, and how these factors influence your teaching methods.

Here are some ways teachers can enhance children’s visual arts experiences:

Positioning the visual arts as a tool for thinking

Art-making enables children to think in divergent ways about a topic. It also immediately reflects back ideas to the child, so it is a powerful tool for enabling thinking and reflection. When teachers position arts experiences as opportunities to think and communicate ideas, all learners can be encouraged to engage, not just those who have existing skills and confidence in making art.

To position the visual arts as a tool for thinking in your own practice you might:

• Intentionally provide regular and ongoing open-ended opportunities for spontaneous meaning-making and communicating ideas with visual arts materials. Attend to their art-making, listening to and joining conversations to be present to the narratives and meanings that emerge as they create.
• Encourage children to draw their ideas and thoughts, as drawing seems to support cognitive complexity and abstraction.
• Discuss children’s artworks in terms of the message or idea that the child aimed to convey rather than the aesthetic qualities of the work or how realistic they may be. You might ask children what they are discovering about their subject matter in the process of trying to make their art to emphasise thinking and meaning-making and to engage children at a complex cognitive level.
• Share an expectation that it may take several attempts to effectively convey an idea. Keep children’s artworks as a record of their developing thinking to be reviewed, reflected upon and communicated to others, and use artworks in displays to emphasise children’s developing working theories and knowledge.

Creating a community of learners that use visual arts to think about and communicate ideas

Children’s art-making can be used as a forum for exchanging ideas and to open up dialogue that is both cognitively challenging and engaging. Once shared, ideas are available for all the children to explore, and they may start to link and integrate each other’s concepts and ideas in their artworks. In doing so, children are likely to build more complex concepts as well as more complex strategies for representing ideas.

To create a community of learners you might:

• Promote a social context for art-making by providing high quality, interesting and well-presented materials in a safe and comfortable space set aside for art-making.
• Encourage children to engage with others socially as they draw or create so that they can exchange ideas about what they are drawing and support each other in using materials and resources in particular ways. You might invite a child who has mastered a technique to show another child.
• Promote dialogue in small groups around children’s explorations in the visual arts that focuses on observations of children’s strategies for learning, thinking, and making meaning through the visual arts. For example, you might note a special technique that a child is using or discuss different ways of depicting objects and phenomena.
• Encourage children to talk about, share, discuss, revisit and revise their artworks, particularly in terms of the meaning and information contained in their drawing or artwork, to lead them to construct some shared understandings. You might then ask children to use the visual arts to represent their new, modified understandings.
• Put artwork on display in ways which demonstrate children’s divergent thinking on the same topic or inquiry.

Encouraging artistic thinking processes and dispositions

It is important to identify, encourage and acknowledge children’s creative and artistic thinking. The behaviours, dispositions and thinking skills that support the visual arts include engaging and sustaining attention, envisioning or imagining possibilities, observing details, evaluating processes and products, and being playful and creative. A disposition for creativity involves transforming or inventing something and actively creating meaning, with an eye for difference, transformation and innovation.

To teach artistic thinking skills and dispositions you might:

• Support children to engage with a problem, to focus and persist with it.
• Encourage children to observe, and to attend to visual details more closely than they ordinarily would, in order to see things that otherwise might not be seen.
• Talk to children before they start building or making to help them envisage what they might achieve, and to imagine the next steps. For example, if children are going to build a city, having a collaborative discussion about what each of them has seen and experienced in a city might help them envision possibilities and develop more elaborate mental pictures of what they are going to build. If they are making a model of their dog in clay, talking about what their dog feels like, and what he or she likes to play might support children to create a richer piece.
• Help children evaluate what they have done, particularly in relation to their ideas and intentions, and to critically reflect on their work in progress. You might ask where they struggled or had difficulty, how they resolved that, and what they might try differently next time. You might also support their ability to examine, analyse and interpret visual images and works.
• Encourage children to reach beyond their existing capability to extend their ideas and explore what else might be possible, while embracing mistakes and accidents as learning opportunities. You might challenge children to add something to their artwork or representation, for example, to add another layer, balcony or turret to their block building or to populate it with some characters and create narratives.
• Give feedback which is intentionally focused on the specific skill you are helping the child to develop. For example, you might comment on the child’s ability to observe carefully or point out what might need further attention.

Collaborative art-making

Active collaboration and shared engagement between teachers and children can support children’s development in visual art-making as teachers position themselves as co-learners with children, listening to children’s emerging meaning-making, sharing narration with them and experiencing their ways of constructing knowledge. This can be more insightful than asking children about what they have created once it is complete. Drawing with children (on the same surface) can be powerful for opening up communication with children and learning more about their interests, ideas, and intentions, and for offering opportunities to expand on children’s understandings and learning.

To try collaborative art-making in your own practice you might:

• Support children’s mark-making through verbal dialogue and gesture as well as co-drawing to validate the child’s work. For example, ‘I like how you made thick lines. I am going to make thick lines too.’
• Listen to, and contribute to, children’s narration as they draw. Talk with the child about what you are doing, attend to and share non-verbal gestures and expressions.
• Use the marks that you observe children working with. You might slow down some of the movements to make them more deliberate, or retrace the lines that children draw. Learn from the child, share and exchange skills with them to become familiar with different media and to expand your own artistic skills.
• Try to work together, co-ordinating marks and drawings. Don’t try to control the child’s mark-making, even if they move off the shared surface that you are using (instead, sustain your interest in the shared work which might encourage the child to return to it).
• Look at and respond to the child’s work. Focus on colour and the use of material and support children’s thinking, self-expression and communication of ideas, rather than aiming for a particular representation or level of realism.