During the past month the children in School age 3 at RisingOaks Early Learning | John Sweeney have been working very hard on developing their drawing skills. Many children have begun to practice their favourite characters, team logos, country flags, and their family members. We have been exploring with a variety of materials such as markers, pencil crayons, stamps and even paint.
We learned that it is best to start your drawing with a pencil to ensure you can erase any unwanted sketches. This way we can determine that our drawing is just how we imagined, before colouring it in. One of the children shared, “It’s kind of like we are making our own colouring pages!" This was a great observation because once we are done our pencil drawing, what we have left is similar to a colouring page.
The educators were able to scaffold their learning by incorporating people shaped stencils to assist the children with their drawings. This encouraged many children to make family portraits and share the different dynamics of their families. When the children shared their families with their peers, they were able to develop their sense of self as well as the ability to communicate with their friends about their identity. It was so great to hear the children talk about their families with such pride. The children were excited to celebrate the similarities with their peer's families and kept and open mind and understanding regarding their differences.
The children continued to use the people stencils, but instead used them to design monsters by moving the stencil around to create arms and legs in unordinary places. Others would make drawings of their friends and inquire about their eye colour and other genetic traits.
To build on our interests, we will try to incorporate different tools into the classroom, such as the “skin tone” pencils and markers. We will encourage the children to make puppets of themselves with yarn hair and other materials to show our sense of identity.
