What kinds of experimental work can be carried out with these media? In the Infant school, for the most part, children should be given paint and paper and encouraged to paint pictures of their own choice. When children first come to school they are often so interested in using paint that it would be inappropriate to insist that they mix it themselves first. As soon as possible, however, and certainly by the end of their first year in school, they should be mixing their own. We often deny our young children much pleasure by doing this for them for far too long. The Infant school is the place where children will make many discoveries about colour mixing if they are given the opportunity. It may also be useful to consider suitable ways of giving powder colour to children for work. One of the easiest and most satisfactory in use is to collect or buy a number of small jars, put dry powder colour into them and provide a number of spatulas for transferring the paint from them to the mixing palettes. Wooden ice-cream spoons or plastic paste spreaders serve this purpose well. Each child or group of children then has a pot of each of the dry colours available. As the containers are separate it is quite easy to wash out any individual one, and if brushes are kept away from them, very little powder is wasted. The paint is mixed on separate palettes. Old plates, perhaps from the school canteen, are useful for this, but there are all sorts of small jars and containers which can be collected as palettes. The patty pan kind of palette is useful, but a difficulty arises if a child wishes to keep a colour he has mixed from one lesson to the next. With separate palettes this is possible.

Children are frequently influenced by the materials given to them and by the way these are displayed. The Infant teacher must see that all the children in her charge have the opportunity and encouragement to try out different kinds, colours and sizes of paper and different kinds of brushes, although in both cases she should avoid the very small sizes unless she has some exceptional children. Most children have not sufficient powers of co-ordination at this stage to get anything from small-scale work. Finger painting and sponge painting ought to be introduced in the Infant classes. Finger painting is made much easier if a small quantity of powder paste is added to the paint. This gives it more body and makes it easier to use.

Intelligent top Infant children will be ready for some of the suggestions made for Juniors and there is nothing against occasional class lessons or group lessons of this kind.

The first problem we often have to deal with, is how to improve children's ability to handle paint. Painting involves a number of different kinds of movement, requiring varying kinds of control. Children will discover many of these for themselves if they are given adequate opportunity for exploring the use of paint at the Infant stage. They may need some guidance in the actual physical process of mixing paint to a consistency for work, but they will learn rapidly from their own experience. If they have not had these opportunities at the early stages, however, they may need a good deal of help later on, because their ideas will be a long way ahead of their technical skill. One of the best ways of increasing the number of kinds of painting a child can do, is through pattern work and abstract pictures. A pattern or abstract picture does not present problems of drawing, nor is the colour and tone scheme limited by the demands of realism. Composition can be thought of purely as composition, widiout interference from the story behind the picture which is a limiting factor in many children's drawings. It is possible to isolate a particular aspect of the subject—the handling of paint, tone, colour and so on—and to concentrate attention on this. Once the idea has been thoroughly absorbed, it can be applied, consciously or unconsciously, to picture making.

In recent work on increasing the ability to handle paint in my own school, we connected the work very closely with work in movement. At the beginning of the art lesson we went out into the playground, and drew large shapes, stretching as much as we could, tensing every muscle and moving slowly. Each child was asked to make sure that the shape was as large as it could be, that it was the kind of shape that only he could draw, quite unlike anyone else's. Questioning brought out the fact that a contrasting shape could be light and delicate and quick, and we drew such shapes in the air. Back in the classroom, we filled large sheets of paper with two shapes, drawn directly in paint—one quick and light and delicate, and the other firm and strong and tense. One shape was interlaced in the other. We looked at each other's paintings and noticed the difference in the lines that the different kinds of movement produced. A few more lines were added to each design, the children noticing particularly the kind of movement used to produce them. This further addition of lines divided the designs up into numbers of smaller shapes. We then discussed the movements required to produce fillings for some of these shapes—dabs, flicks, carefully drawn lines, spots and so on. Then we filled the remaining shapes with different textures and widi some solids.

This sort of experiment could obviously be extended to include other kinds of movement. The kinds that can be included in a single pattern are limited if the pattern is to retain unity. We followed it by working out a repeating movement to a repeating rhythm tapped out on a tambour and patterns were then made repeating this shape continuously, but not regularly, all over the paper. This pattern too was finished with the addition of textures and solids. We could equally well have used this method to create a regular repeating pattern.