Pre-K children need so much more than just crayons and glue. Here is a list of my favorite art supplies for Pre-K. Art materials are so essential in Pre-K. You can also check out all the materials I have in the Art Center here.
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These are some of the top art materials I recommend and use in my classroom…
Oil Pastels
What’s so great about oil pastels? The color! They look awesome on construction paper. You can draw on black or navy paper and the colors are so bright and stand out, unlike crayons on dark paper. These are also better for wax resist art, and can be used to decorate clay flower pots. The Crayola set of 28 Oil Pastels is great for Pre-K. These are thicker than most oil pastels, so they are perfect for preschoolers because they won’t break as easily as the thin ones. Colorations from Discount School Supply also makes a similar set.
Liquid Watercolor
These are the best watercolor paints and have so many uses. You can paint with them using paintbrushes or Q-tips, or you can drop them on absorbent paper with eye droppers. Use them for colored water mixing. Use them for science experiments. Color the water in your sensory table. They can be used to replace food coloring in any non-edible activity. These have endless uses! My recommended brands: Colorations and Sax Washable Liquid Watercolor Paints.
Watercolor Paints (Dry)
The dry watercolor paint is always fun, too, but these do take practice for children to understand how to use them correctly. Children have to be taught to wet the paint and swirl it around to get more color onto their brush (so the colors won’t be watery), and they have to wash their brush between colors. My recommended brand: Prang Washable Watercolor Set.
You might even want to try tube watercolors.
Tempera Paint
This is a classroom staple for the art easel. Tempera is a paint that works well for children’s color mixing activities. You can also mix the tempera yourself to give children more color variety. In spring, mix white with colors to make pastels. Mix white with black to make gray. Mix a tiny amount of black in a cup of yellow and you’ll get an awesome slime green color for Halloween! My recommended brand is Crayola Washable Tempera Paint. I’m sure there are other great brands, but I know from experience that some cheaper brands of tempera paint might not wash out of the kids’ clothes. You can fix this by adding liquid soap to the paint.
Tissue Paper
Tissue Paper can be used in many projects. I like to have both large sheets of tissue as well as tissue squares. I ask parents and family to save used colored tissue paper from gifts and these can be folded and placed in the art center for children to use in open-ended art projects.
Colored Sand
I LOVE using Colored Sand as a different texture and material for children to experience. Read here about how we use it.
Glitter Glue
Glitter Glue usually works better for young children than the kind of glitter you sprinkle from a shaker. Glitter glue bottles have a tendency to clog, so I pour glitter glue into small paint trays and have children dip Q-tips into it to spread onto their project. It’s also helpful to have some loose glitter on hand for things like discovery bottles.
Liquid Starch
Liquid Starch is great for “painting” tissue paper onto construction paper to make it stick. It’s also an ingredient in slime and salt paint.
Colored Pens
Pens are great for making detailed drawings. Sometimes you might want to give children nothing but black pens so they can focus on what they are drawing without worrying about color. These blackline drawings can be colored in later with colored pencils. The best drawing pens for Pre-K are Papermate Flair Pens. Many pens have either a metal tip, which are difficult for young children because they need to be held at a certain angle; or pens have a long felt tip which will be mashed by preschoolers. Flair pens have a felt tip, but the tip is short and can’t be mashed. These are great for your Writing Center, too.
Colored Masking Tape
I was introduced to Colored Masking Tape by my friend Sheryl at Teaching 2 and 3 Year Olds. This is one of the most fun art materials ever, and can be used in so many ways. I do not recommend buying a wooden dispenser for the tape (which you will see in many catalogs). Those dispensers are very difficult to use. I put the tape in a basket and children either tear it or cut it with scissors.
Crepe Paper Streamer
Crepe Paper Streamer is an inexpensive item you can buy just about anywhere that’s great for art projects or open-ended use in your art center. Children cut off pieces and glue onto paper. Kids get really creative with it.
Crayons
Every classroom has crayons, but most have only the 8 basic colors. While I do order the Crayola Large Classpack Crayons in 8 basic colors, I also like to offer children thin crayons in lots of colors. Their art is so much prettier when they have more color options. I either get a set of 96 colors or the Telescoping Crayon Tower with 150 colors. At the beginning of the year, I only have the 8 basic colors, and later bring out the others. I normally buy Crayola, but Prang is an awesome brand of crayons as well. You can also get packs of pink and gray large crayons.
Markers
Again, don’t limit preschoolers to the 8 basic colors. I get the big class pack of 8 basic colors, and then buy several small boxes of Bold, Bright, and Tropical to get a wider variety of colors. Just as with crayons, children’s artwork is prettier when they have more color options than just the 8 basic colors. Another great option for a wide variety of colors is the Telescoping Pip-Squeaks Marker Tower of 50 colors and the Crayola Pip Squeaks Skinnies set of 64 colors. Offer children both thick and thin markers. Did you know you can buy just red markers? It seems that red is the color most used in my classroom, and we run out of red before the other colors. My recommended brand: Crayola Washable.
Colored Pencils
Crayola Colored Pencils are great for every day use, especially for leaving out in your art center all the time. For special projects, I recommend Prismacolor Colored Pencils. These are pricey, but the quality is SO much better than cheaper colored pencils. I found a slightly used set for much less money on ebay once, and these have lasted for years. These need to be hand sharpened with a small hand held pencil sharpener, which is why I save these for special projects rather than everyday use. Also consider using 40% off coupons at stores like Michaels and Hobby Lobby.
What are some of your favorite art materials for Pre-K? Share yours in the comments below.
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The image of the used Crayola cray pas box is taken right from my classroom. No replacement though. I bought them with my own money. 🙂
My personal faves for art supplies are sequins, glitter, pom poms and I also love using pipe cleaners!
Thanks for sharing your list with us Karen! Love the idea for using crepe paper! We will have to try that soon! Hope your year is going well so far 🙂
Great Ideas!
We use a lot of what you have on the list. We use aluminium foil to paint on and also make ornament I cut out ornaments out of cardboard and the children used red tissue paper and foil and glued them on
Love the idea to use oil pastels. I’m going to introduce them this year!! Two of our favourite activities to use at art centres are white boards with washable felts (the kids just love wiping the boards clean at the end!) and floam. It’s great for “sculpting,” it’s not messy, doesn’t crumble, and it lasts forever.
I love all your suggestion. we use many of them in our Child Development Classroom. Last year I found “CRAYON ROCKS” I loved the soy-based crayon and how they are designed to help a preschooler use good pencil grip. Google – Crayon Rocks for their website….. I also use Handwriting without Tears – Flip Crayons too.
Crayon rocks are on my “to do” list. Haven’t tried them yet. I’ve never heard of the flip crayons until now – very cool!
Flip Crayons are a product of Handwriting without Tears. They are made to color and then put it down and flip for the next color. The product line has a CD with a song but they don’t both have to be purchases.
Love the ideas – haven’t used colored masking tape, but will this year. I love Discount School Supply’s fingerpaint. We use it for much of our painting. I have 2s also and it’s the only REALLY washable paint I’ve found!
In our Preschool room we love to use shaving cream in the art center. Its great because it gives an added sensory to their creativity. It makes great finger paint
I miss using shaving cream and adding textures to it. Also using rice and beans. Our regulations don’t allow any “food” item to be used in art. Also anything that the label states “keep out if the reach of children”. For safety reasons these items must be kept in a locked cabinet.
Thanks Karen for sharing your favorites.
Another favorite of ours is finger paint. It’s so much fun to play in and create with. Ever try freezing it? We use small containers such as single-size yogurt cups and add a popsicle stick for a handle. Once frozen we plop the cubes on a paper covered table and let the kids paint/play away. Such a great sensory experience as the paint melts and when it dries it’s quite pretty with a waxy texture. Freeze it with a little shaving creme and it’s a whole other day of fun!
Hi Laura, I do use finger paint, but I have not tried freezing it! Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll have to try that.
I use everything, which all of my kids LOVE , but the pens are new. Thank you for sharing, I will try the pens. I never thought about the metal tips, I just tell my kids to keep trying, or I help them hold the pen the right way, because I did not think about the fact that the pen needed to be held a certain way.
Love the pen idea,will be buying some for my class.
Shaving cream mixed with white glue (like Elmer’s) is a fun art medium. The glue helps the shaving cream keep it’s foamy texture. We’ve used it to cover paper bunnies and paper polar bears and clouds too.
Love the ideas! I am going to order the pastels and the pens…
I love using glue dots in my class. Wiggley eyes, foam shapes, on almost anything.
I especially LOVE the instant stick and no mess of flowing glue. Don’t get me
wrong I do use glue too:))
I love to use an old salad spinner(the pump kind) and marbles covered in paint. I’ve done this to make a planet, or to decorate a flower. Lots of fun!
My kids love to cut apart old greeting cards. I keep the fronts of the cards and have them donated also. They make new cards or create new things with them. I also use my scrapbooking paper scraps- the variety of patterns is fun!
And one favorite every year at the art table is ENVELOPES! Keep any that come with bills that you don’t use. They seem to like the business type envelopes more than the colorful card envelopes!
Not sure if these are technically ‘art supplies’ or not, but they are always at my art table so I thought I’d share!
Last year I discovered Crayola Twistable Slick Stik crayons. They are super smooth & bold in color. Similar to oil pastels in that they can be rubbed with fingers or paper towel for a different look.
We love using bingo markers, paint, glitter, and the liquid paint. I love using the liquid paint over white crayons. The kids are not sure what they have drawn on paper and when they do the paint it pretty cool of the different creations the kids make.
I’m a children’s librarian programming for birth thru 18 years. I loved seeing your list. When you reminded me about the oil pastels, I thought that’s perfect for stretching my dollars — my little ones can use them on construction paper and the teens will go nuts using them on clay pots (cheaper than acrylic paint for them!) Thank you!
I also couldn’t live without paint daubbers or “Bingo Stampers” for our littlest ones.
My kids love to use the water color tablets – I put them in dollar store muffin pans. They are a good substitute for the single water color strips. My kids seem to have a hard time working with the little paint tablets – they mix up the colors and use up the tablets rather fast. On the other hand they can share the tablets and they last a long time.
My students also enjoy using water color pencils – you use them as regular color pencils. Then paint on the drawings with water and they turn into water color!! You can find them at Discount School Supplies as single packs and class packs.
Love the ideas.
I love Discount School Supply’s Biocolor Paint. We use it for everything from finger painting to poster painting. I love that it doesn’t crack when you are rolling up large art to send home with the child. Plus the colors are bright!
I taught preschool for over 30 years and your art supplies are right on! In my preschool classes, we also used lots of stampers, brayers, bubble wrap, cookie cutters for printing with paint, kitchen gadgets, homemade salt dough, play dough, and we could never have done without our glue bottles with the tap N Glue tops!! (the best invention for preschool ever). Cookie sheets are great, too, for fingerprinting and containing glitter projects.
Several years ago, Crayola came out with “Color Sticks”…they are like a colored pencil that rarely needs sharpening and has no paper like crayons. My kids loved them. I checked the Crayola website, and they were there. I don’t remember them breaking easily either. 🙂
I also enjoy using glue in nancy bottles and glue sticks.
I am a huge fan of play dough! It is very easy to make your own and there are many varieties of recipes on the Internet.
I have also included pencil crayons in my arts/craft area. I have found the pencil crayons by Melissa and Doug to be the best, due to their thickness (similar to primary pencils). Also the point doesn’t break as quickly. A bit more expensive but worth it.
Mr, Sketch. My class loves making smelly art pictures.