Teach your young child how to draw using our free preschool curriculum, which includes more than 50 exciting drawing activities, plus an introduction to important concepts in the area of color theory.
Preschool Art
The core of our curriculum is a nearly 10 hour YouTube playlist that includes step-by-step guides to drawing dozens of fun artworks, as well as a child-friendly introduction to color theory, using the Colourblocks show.
The Importance of Practice
Roughly half of our curriculum consists of hands-on drawing practice. In preschool, the main focus of drawing practice is twofold:
- Helping students become comfortable holding and using a crayon or pencil
- Teaching children how to use simple shapes to draw more complex pictures
Of course, along the way, students using our curriculum will also have the opportunity to create some very fun pictures. Moreover, the skills they learn will be easy to translate to drawing all kinds of things. Don’t be surprised if your child starts doodling some great artwork, even when you aren’t trying to teach Art!
Colourblocks
We’ve previously explained the value of Alphablocks and Numberblocks. Colourblocks is a relatively newer show that teaches basic concepts like colors, patterns, and color mixing. For an educational children’s show, it has extremely impressive production quality. The visuals are beautiful, and the show is filled with catchy songs that young children love.
More importantly, it teaches basic color theory at a level of detail that goes well beyond what most students experience in preschool or elementary school. Whereas most kindergartens incorrectly teach that red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors (and never consider the difference between additive and subtractive color mixing), Colourblocks provides a much more accurate explanation of how color mixing works. It correctly teaches that for the purpose of printing, the standard primary colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow – and even goes so far as to explain that most printers also include black, because mixing black from primary colors is inconvenient.
Our playlist includes all the Colourblocks episodes in Seasons 1 and 2, in the correct order.
Required Supplies
Aside from our playlist, all you really need are some crayons and paper. Colored pencils will also work fine, if you prefer to use them instead of crayons.
One of the YouTube channels we feature frequently in the playlist (Art for Kids Hub) uses gel crayons. Gel crayons are not necessary, but do allow for layering of colors in a way that isn’t possible with regular crayons. If you use regular crayons, simply instruct your child to wait until their whole picture is outlined before coloring things in.
Using this Curriculum
Each day your child follows this curriculum, they will do one of the following two things:
- Draw four or five drawings.
- Watch approximately 15 minutes of Colourblocks videos.
These tasks are alternated every day. The first day your child uses the curriculum, give them crayons and paper, and then play the playlist in a location where they can watch the videos while drawing. Especially during the first day, you may need to provide a little hands-on assistance for your young artist. After four drawing videos, the playlist will switch to a Colourblocks video. When this happens, stop the playlist until the next day of Art class.
For the second day of Art class, your student won’t need any supplies; simply resume the playlist from your last stopping point. Play the playlist until the next drawing instruction video starts, then stop for the day.
Continue this process of alternating between hands-on drawing activities and hands-off Colourblocks videos until you reach the end of the playlist. This will take roughly 30 sessions.
