Benefits of rock painting for children
Some of the benefits of rock painting for children include teaching the concept of “sharing is caring”, supporting their creative outlets, learning new age-appropriate artistic techniques, improve abilities to follow step by step instructions and be patient. The list really is endless!
There are great ways to use rock painting in the classroom including for various educational activities, rock hunting, creating games, simple life cycles, gift giving and story stone sets.
Benefits of rock painting for Preschoolers
Simple lines in alternative colours would encourage the children’s hand control and turn taking skills as they share their pen supplies around with their friends.
Other images could be drawn by the teachers to support the children’s abilities to trace and recognise such as shapes, numbers and alphabet letters- why not learn along the way we say!
Another great strategy would be to provide some of our great stencils and just let the children go for it and see what they come up with.
For this age group any of the 3mm Life of Colour paint markers would be the best paint pens for the job due to the ease of handling.
Benefits of rock painting for young kids 5-6
Primary school age is a fun stage because they have so much imagination and whilst their drawing skills are still far from developed the children are able to follow simple steps to complete their art.
Using the 3mm and 1.5mm Life of Colour paint pens this age group could easily attempt things such as - Stick figures, hearts, simple flowers, balls, cartoon animals, faces, houses and lots of everyday objects.
Get the children to write their names on rocks to strengthen their abilities in penmanship and to give a sense of ownership.
Play games of Tic tac toe using their rock creations- check out some of our pictures below to give you some inspiration.
Benefits of rock painting for kids 7-9
Literacy skills are really developing during this stage and one way to encourage them is to create sets of story stones together using your Life of Colour acrylic paint pens! We would recommend introducing the 1mm paint pen at this age to compliment the other pen sizes.
Fun colour combos can motivate them to embrace art in the learning process, kids in elementary school age will enjoy the Earth Colours for nature school projects. Drawing water, grass, wood, mountains, roads, houses is very easy using this set.
The developing ability to copy pictures and set a great task for the children by assigning everyone in the class with a character, event or scene to complete using the book as a guide to follow.
Choose the classrooms favourite book (Hungry caterpillar for example) and pinpoint the main events, scenes and characters from the book.
Read all about story stones using beloved Australian books, here.
Benefits of rock painting for PRE-TEENS - TWEENING!
Refined art skill sets are developing as teens have access to many more mediums and creative outlets.
Techniques such as shading, blending, bleeding, hatching and sgraffito(to scratch) may be employed by this age group in rock painting.
The ability to execute perspective and relative sizing using intricate pen work will see some realistic imagery come to life on rocks!
This age group often seeks crafts of interest so why not try to concentrate on images that they find appealing which also may include hemes they want to create for their siblings like Harry Potter, Angry birds or Bluey.
Writing skills are now well underway with the development of cursive script teens can scribe fancy looking messages to their friends and loved ones to spread the love!
