Explore the Curiosity and Kindness Art Week Activities!
If you’re taking part in the AccessArt Art Week 2026, you can find activities chosen to help you explore the theme of curiosity and kindness on this page.
Below, you will find a range of activities that encourage learners to be curious about the world and discover new ideas. During this week, through looking at and making art, they will explore what is important to them, share and connect with others and learn about how they belong in the world.
Take time to choose activities that will engage both learners and teachers, and try not to overload the week. Exploring a range of disciplines can help keep the energy going, and you can draw on a variety of preliminary activities to extend and enrich the projects you choose.
Curiosity and Kindness: Introduce Art Week
Start your AccessArt Art Week by introducing children to the theme of curiosity and kindness through a whole-school assembly. Set the tone for the week and help learners understand the ideas they will explore in their creative work.
In this PowerPoint, you will find a short story to help children engage with the Art Week theme, along with artworks that demonstrate how these ideas can be explored through creativity, and questions to support reflection.
Find the PowerPoint here.
Curiosity and Kindness: Make Sketchbooks
Start by making sketchbooks specifically for your Art Week so that all drawings, visual notes, material explorations and other sketchbook work can be gathered together in one place. These sketchbooks will make a great record of the whole week, and can be displayed before being given to learners to take home.
Think about having the whole school making sketchbooks on day one of your Art Week as a morning or afternoon activity. The energy of the session will set the week off to a great pace and create a shared experience across the school.
Explore Making Sketchbooks…
make an elastic band sketchbook
Tips for Teachers…
Ask learners to collect and save recycled cardboard and paper in the weeks prior to your Art Week. This way, they not only contribute to the materials needed to make their sketchbooks, but also begin making choices about the kinds of papers they would like to include.
Curiosity and Kindness: Preliminary Activities
Throughout the week, use drawing and making exercises to create energy, develop skills, open minds and enrich projects.
The exercises you choose to do can stand alone, they don’t have to line up closely with the main projects you choose (although of course, they can).
Interspersing the days with drawing and making activities will help vary energy levels and keep children engaged. Think carefully about why you are choosing a particular activity: is it to develop skills, introduce new materials, calm children, or boost their energy levels?
Explore Preliminary Activities…
Finding kindness in marks made by artists
Curiosity and kindness: prompt cards for making
Curiosity and Kindness: Main Projects
The following projects explore drawing and making and can be used across different age groups. All projects will be enriched by the skills and experiences practised through the exercises above.
Choose projects that you think will appeal to teachers and learners and allow for a relaxed, exploratory pace, making full use of the time and space in your collapsed timetable to enable a rich exploration of different materials and ideas.
Build time into your projects for talking, reflecting, and even photography and documentation if you have access to tablets.
We recommend one or two projects per class for a full Art Week, depending on your learners, timetable, and projects. You can always extend a project by doing more of the drawing and making exercises above.
Explore Main Projects…
Creativity Medals
Inspired by the creativity medals resource and the theme of curiosity and kindness, explore gift-giving in your setting.
Encourage learners to reflect on the kindness they have experienced from others in their class, and invite them to create kindness medals to celebrate it. Learners can also make a medal for someone in their class they do not know very well.
Making a Rollercoaster
Invite your learners to connect and play through making.
With a focus on collaboration, making, imagination, and joy, learners share their ideas and experiences of rollercoasters to generate a real sense of fun and excitement in the classroom, and construct with 3D materials to create a class rollercoaster.
Worry Dolls
Explore gift-giving and wellbeing in your setting, inspired by the theme of the Art Week.
With a focus on making, this project invites learners to create a worry doll for a classmate to help ease their worries, showing how creativity can foster emotional connection. Encourage learners to be curious not only about the materials they use, but also about the person they are creating the worry doll for.
Pavement Art
Use art to celebrate your community and share messages of kindness and joy.
Inspired by the work of artists Rowan Briggs-Smith and Chalk Riot, learners can use the pavement or playground as a canvas to create kind messages. Dedicate time to planning out messages and drawings in sketchbooks and explore typography and stencilling with older learners.
If you’re able to access a drone, capture bird’s-eye photos and videos of learners creating their shared messages.
Creating Portraits and Celebrating Class Success
Encourage learners to celebrate their classmates with this portraiture project.
In this activity, learners will create experimental large-scale pastel portraits of their classmates, adding marks and words to celebrate one another. Create a sense of community and energy in the room by inviting learners to stand as they work, using their whole arm to create gestural drawings.
This activity will foster connections in the classroom and can be adapted across different materials.
Set Design
Create imaginative, sculptural 3D sets inspired by texts that explore kindness and curiosity.
In this project, learners will experiment with construction and mixed media to create a maquette of a set that visually represents a line (or lines) from a poem. Explore how words might conjure figurative, imaginative, or symbolic visuals (colours, forms, shapes, marks) for learners.
Choose from a selection of poems related to curiosity and kindness to guide their exploration here.
A Visual Poetry Zine with Monotype
Create a visual interpretation and creative response to poetry, exploring the themes of curiosity and kindness.
In this activity, learners will create a visual poetry zine using collage and monotype. They will explore the meaning of words and emotions by connecting colour, line, and shape, and reflect on how the themes of the poem might appear in their lives.
Choose from a selection of poems related to curiosity and kindness to guide their exploration here.
