Painting with straight lines. This is another exercise you can do with children to try to reshape how they think about drawing. Give them paint and a piece of corrugated card and ask them to produce an image printing with only the long or the short end of the card. No dragging, no using the corners... just try to create a picture by combining long and short straight lines. It's not very easy to produce something realistic, but that's the point! It's a way of supporting children to become comfortable with abstraction. And although the finished outcomes might not look much like the original subject matter, the children will have produced something that is quite interesting and striking in its own right.

Create your own pattern key by collecting patterns from the environment and also from your own imagination. Give each pattern a creative name and then challenge yourself to try to use all of your new patterns when you shade your next drawing.

Encourage children to really look at a piece of art and use those important inference skills. Collect picture clues that answer the traditional who, why, what, where, when questions. I have these on laminated sheets so they can be reused for a carpet activity time and again but children could also use a photocopy so their creation can be stuck in their sketchbook.

This is a lovely way of teaching children about tints, tones and shades. Use this as a whiteboard prompt to inspire sketchbook work or paint directly onto the sheet!

Manipulating pattern to create different values is a much more innovative way of shading than the traditional. Once children have practiced here, see if they can use as many patterns and tones as they can in their next drawing!

Take a line for a walk! Look around you for inspiration and see how many different imaginative lines you can create!

When engaging children in active looking, try getting them to focus on the negative space and collect the shapes and patterns they see. Record them by overlapping and intersecting the shapes to make your own abstract composition.

Make an art telescope (it's just a piece of rolled up paper!) and guide children around a painting on the interactive whiteboard. Maybe ask them to search for clues or take them on a tour of the painting - the telescope isolates parts of the picture to encourage children to see things they would not have seen at first glance!