This art making afternoon was inspired by Kathleen from @bekindandmakeart. Her feed is full of beautifully curated and inspiring projects with her mini artists. You can find her tpt store here too.

A template of different size and shaped paint brushes became a fun way to talk about the variety strokes each can make. It was a super engaging and low prep lesson with oodles of vocab in our class chats. For mini mini's we talked about the thick, thin, fat, skinny, wobbly, straight, curved strokes we made with the different brushes. For bigger minis we named each paint brush from round, flat, square, fan. There was a quiz involved - who can find the fan brush the fastest?! What type of line will this brush create??

If you don't have every style of paint brush, that's ok! Just use different sizes. This template is also perfect for finger painting for the mini minis.

What you need

• The brush template

• Different coloured poster paint

• Paint brushes - lots of different sizes. You can find the names of each one we used below.

Paint brushes left to right:

Tiny round brush, varnishing brush (or large square brush), large round brush, fan brush, small square brush, filbert brush, small round brush.

What to do

Have you mini's match the paint brush with the most appropriate one on the template. Talk about the name of each brush.

Place a rainbow palette of colours in front and let them know that one paint brush will be used for one colour (no mixing here!). Which paint brush will have which colour? Have a little quiz to remember which paint brush is which (who is using blue for the fan brush? which brush is the round brush?!).

Minis can load up their paint brush and make a gorgeous thick, thin, wobbly or straight line down their page. Then their brush goes into the bucket (or wipe it down) to use for the next colour.