Art As with music, the point of teaching art is both to help your child appreciate it, and to help him create his own art. Provide your child with art materials such as paper, paints, crayons, card, glue and modelling clay (you can get clay that will harden in an ordinary oven). Draw, paint and model with your child. Remember, it's not so much the finished product that matters as the experience of making it (in other words, don't worry if you think you can't draw - just enjoy having a go!) Especially with younger children, explore ways of expressing emotion through art as well as making realistic drawings and paintings. Draw from real life - look closely at an object or scene, and try to get down on paper exactly what you see. Talk about the kinds of patterns and textures you can see, and how you could reproduce them on paper. Help your child to explore colour mixing and matching with paints and soluble pencils. What colours do you have to mix to make a particular colour? Are there any colours you can't make by mixing? Look at DIY paint charts and colour wheels, and see if you can work out why they are arranged the way they are. Look at colours and patterns in nature and in the built environment. Do patterns repeat? Are they always identical, or are there small variations? Let your child choose posters, pictures and photographs to go in her bedroom. Talk about why she likes certain ones better than others. Discuss why you chose the pictures on your walls as well. Talk about artists, the kinds of work they produce and what they were trying to achieve (it's probably easiest to pick artists with a distinctive style, such as Lowry, Turner, Monet and Van Gogh). Visit art galleries, museums and country houses. Discuss what you see there. In particular, talk about the way people lived and the kinds of things they liked to have around them. Visit craft shows, and let your child see the kinds of things people make today. If there are demonstrations, so much the better. If your child is interested, see if he can talk to the craftspeople about what they do and why. Back to helping your child at home