Location: indoor or outdoor

Materials: art materials of your choosing

Rather than sitting all of your children down at once to do an art project, consider setting up the materials and extending an invitation to anyone that wants to join.

There are many benefits to this approach:

• Avoid needing to clean up all of your children at the same time
• Allows 1:1 interactions with your children
• Children will come when they want to, leading to deeper engagement
• Fewer children involved in the activity can allow for greater focus
• Spreads children out throughout your space
• This allows you to control how many children are participating in the activity at a time (maybe you only want 2 kids to paint at a time so you can be really involved)
• Allows flexibility-- children can stay as long as they are interested and then move along to something else

Getting Started with Invitation Art:

1. Set out whatever art materials you want to use for your project.
2. Decide how many children can participate at a time.
3. Announce to your children, "Does anyone want to come paint with me?"
4. Invite as many children as you can fit and are interested to join you.
5. As children wrap up, help them get cleaned up and then invite someone new.
6. When everyone has participated or everything that wanted to participate is done, you can say, "Last chance to paint with me. I'm going to clean it up."