Easy and Fun Pet Art for Preschoolers

Try this simple pet art for preschoolers during your next pet or veterinarian theme. Check out the rest of my art projects for kids once you’re done here.

Below you’ll find some fun pet art that’s very focused on the art process (rather than the product). Kids get a chance to practice fine and gross motor skills as they create a pet art project with just a few materials.

The preschool pet art shared below is focused on winter and snow. But you can easily change it up for any season, or no season at all. Either way, your students will get a kick out of the pet art fun!

Related: Quick as a Cricket Art

During our recent pet theme, the preschool kiddos enjoyed a process art activity we entitled “snowy footprints”.  It was definitely one of the easier winter art projects for kids that I will do again!  I love it when something so very simple turns into a great experience for my students.

Pet Art for Preschoolers

As I already mentioned, this was a process-based art activity.  This means the focus was on the experience the kids had with the art.  The focus wasn’t on a specific end result, although I made sure to display the finished artwork in our classroom.

And I keep referencing preschoolers, but early elementary kids and toddlers will likely enjoy this art experience, too!

How to Prep the Pet Art Activity

First, go ahead and grab the materials for the pet art project. Here’s what we used (I may get commissions for purchases made through links in this post):

• Black construction paper
• White tempera paint
• Small pet toys – specifically dogs and cats

You can definitely integrate a variety of other other animal toys into your pet art for preschoolers! My students were very focused on cats and dogs, so that’s what I stuck with this time around.

Once your supplies are ready, it’s time to set things up. And this is so, so easy to do:

• Place some of the paint in shallow trays or plates.
• Put the pet toys nearby, along with the construction paper.

And that’s all there is to it! Now it’s time to call your students over for all the pet painting fun.

Creating Pet Art for Preschoolers

Before letting the children dive into the pet art, be sure to review any expectations with your students. For example, “Paint only on the paper.”

Since it was winter time the first time we tried this pet art activity, I prefaced with, “Let’s pretend our pets tracked snow into the house!” You don’t have to do that, of course. It just added a silly aspect to the art.

Then it’s just a matter of allowing the kids the space to create with the materials. Since the pet art for preschoolers is open-ended, the children get to decide how to use the materials. So you’ll see a variety of things, such as:

• Kids precisely placing the animal toys on the paper to get the footprints to look “just so!”
• Children stamping pet footprints randomly all over their papers.
• Students dragging the painted toys along the page to make lines rather than footprints.

No matter how the kids create, I’m sure they’ll have fun along the way. My students surely did. I loved engaging the children in conversation as we were painting:

• “What’s your pet doing now?”
• “I wonder how the dog managed to track so much snow inside?”
• “How did you make that design?”

About half the children told me all kinds of stories throughout our pet process art.  One child’s dog “escaped out of the house, then got too cold and ran back inside but didn’t wipe his paws.  Then he got snow all over, and he slipped all over the kitchen floor!”  All of this was said as she was acting out her story with the toy dog and paint!

Not all of the children verbalized what they were doing.  Some were interested in answering my questions, and others wanted to ask their friends my questions.  I loved hearing that!!

What are the Kids Learning as They Create Pet Art?

Did you know that fun art projects like this include all kinds of learning, too?  Isn’t that just a win-win situation?!  Here are some of the early learning skills involved in our pet art for preschoolers:

• Fine motor skills (grasping those little animals carefully and using small finger movements to guide them)
• Gross motor skills (larger actions, like when the kids bounced their pets high into the air, then back down onto the paper)
• Language development (all of those stories, the discussions, and the answers to my questions)
• Higher level thinking (same as above)
• Creativity
• Imagination

And I’m sure that’s not an exhaustive list, either! Needless to say, there’s a lot of skill practice and learning while the children create.

Would your students enjoy this pet art idea? Be sure to save it for later. If you have a Pet Theme Pinterest board or an Art and Crafts Pinterest board, those would be great places to keep this post.

More Pet Activities for Kids

If this pet art for preschoolers was a hit, here are a few more ideas to try with the kids:

• Pet Small World in the Block Center
• Craft Stick Pet Puppets
• Frog Sensory Bin
• Pet Count and Clip Cards
• Bird Art for Preschoolers

Pet Lesson Plans

Let my sister site, Preschool Teacher 101, save you time with done-for-you early childhood resources. We have lesson plans, dramatic play sets, number games, alphabet activities, classroom management guides, and so much more.

Click on the image below to learn more about our lesson plans all about pets!

Join The Pack from Preschool Teacher 101 today for exclusive access to our amazing products. Members get a huge discount on our resources. 

Originally published February 2014.