fa la la la la la, la la, la, laaaaaaaaa!
It doesn’t have to be Christmas to sing that song – just, y’know, switch out the words.
Yesterday, I talked about a healthy freedom of expression our kids can experience just by gifting them with art supplies. Paper, pencils, markers, crayons, scissors, glue and a toss-up of other crafting items crawl from lines and blobs to detailed drawings. One day you’re saying “Ooooh, I love this! Can you tell me about it?” and the next day you’re staring at their creation and marveling over how they’ve advanced so quickly.
When we homeschooled, one of my favorite things to do was Narrations following our History, Language Arts or Independent Readings. I created a printable page with a blank top for drawing and a few lines for their narration. The kids were allowed to draw whatever came to mind, related to the literature, while I was reading.
After I finished reading, they’d write 3 sentences about what I just read. Meredith wasn’t writing then, so she’d dictate and I’d write her words. Even more interesting than their sentences was how they translated the reading into drawings.
Kenny always joined us – though he was just a baby then. He “scribbled” alongside his sisters as soon as he could fist a crayon.
I believe it is a rare child that doesn’t want to color, draw, glue or cut paper. I teach 1st-3rd grade Sunday School. Each week the girls and boys come in, one by one, sit down to their coloring pages, and get after it. Sometimes the boys try to play it cool and act like they don’t want to color, but even when they don’t color the page I give, they’ll flip it over and draw what they want on the back. Heh heh…because THAT isn’t coloring, of course, that is something different altogether in their minds.
In 2000, I decided that my kids’ artwork was just as good as one of my favorite artists, Paul Klee, who often used a sort of grid of geometric shapes, colors and lines in his paintings. I began putting aside and framing some of my favorites…artwork that marked a point in their lives.
At this point Emelie was very shape-oriented in her drawings, always had to write her name (all uppercase, of course), and she preferred (always has) map pencils and Crayons to markers.
This map pencil drawing above hangs by our back door in the kitchen. It makes me smile every time I see it.
She’s still drawing – and she certainly has advanced over the years.
These were painted by Meredith last year. They are still waiting for frames, but hang by push pins in our breakfast room.
Both Meredith and Emelie have created some really fun art through the years and both have won awards in local art shows.
Kenny has a slightly different style to his work – it is more structured and he likes to pair things up evenly on the right and left. Unlike how the girls were for a while, he is less interested in tracing and coloring books, but prefers a blank sheet of paper.
We even have artwork from when Jeff was a child hanging in Kenny’s room – one of the most precious gifts given me from my mother-n-law.
This helicopter hangs over Kenny’s bed. It was done by a 7 year old Jeff with tempera paints on manilla paper.
This was done when Jeff was 4 years old. It was colored first with waxy crayons (the fish and seaweed) and then painted over in sweeps of blue.
Though I do have pictures hanging on my walls that weren’t created by family members, they are growing fewer and farther between. My home is my family’s haven – an expression of those who live here. I can’t imagine a better way to make it so.
