Young children can have a ball squeezing a design onto a large piece of paper if you put your favorite kind of paint into squeeze bottles. Squeeze paint is so fun! I bought my clear plastic squeeze bottles at the local supermarket for 99 cents each. (Normally you would put ketchup or mustard into them.)
Make sure your children are using paint clothes, or at least a smock, since this activity is messy. If you start with green paint along the bottom, you can pick up the paper and have the green paint drip down (upward on the paper) to make some grass. Or you could put blue on the bottom and shake it around for waves on the ocean. Toddlers can just quirt it free-form, since it is mostly the squirting that is fun. I 
warn you: none of these pictures is worth keeping. You simply can’t control the drips with enough accuracy to make a good painting. Some of the older children got frustrated. My seven-year-old accidentally made a huge splotch and was upset until I told him he had a monster creature, and why not make some feet and arms? Suddenly he cheered up, and the huge, ugly blotch turned out to be fun after all.
Tags: art, Early Childhood, young children
