A few weeks ago I told you about my son's drawings, little elaborated, but full of message, because he draws to express something and not precisely to express it to someone, but it does so as a need to tell something without a specific recipient (no He comes with his drawings to show us, unless with a particular drawing he does want to show us something).
In that post I showed my concern about the possibility of someone at school trying to teach him to draw, to give him guidelines and to coerce his method or his way of "talking" through drawing.
Focusing a bit on that vision, I want to start today a series of entries (three, to be more concrete), to explain five things that adults do, unconsciously and normally with the best intention, that help children lose creativity and the desire to draw.
1. Call scribbles to his first drawings
The first mistake that all adults make is to treat babies' first drawings as doodles. We usually say "it is small, it does not know how to draw more than doodles", because we believe that drawing is expressing something that others have to know how to see and, the more real the representation, the better the child draws.
But nevertheless, the children who make constant and endless circles, as if the pen could not stop turning in his hand, they are drawing and they are doing well because that is what they have to do.
The SAR says that a doodle is a “Irregular feature made with the pen, pencil, etc.", Besides being a"Badly drawn writing" It would be something like a poorly made drawing, something that can and should be better and I think I'm not mistaken when I say that we all have as a scribble concept that of a series of strokes without order or meaning that show nothing to the person who go.
But for children it makes sense, because it is a first phase that they must do, a first step after which they will move on to the next, when that sum of continuous circles is limited to only one (which in turn will evolve towards the triangle, the square and other forms that a child does naturally without anyone teaching him ).
I say he must do it because to reach the first circle or the first isolated spiral, the child trains by constantly turning the pen, like when he repeats a word a hundred times in different contexts before making it his own.
So, something as useful and valid as that training drawing should not be called "doodle" or, if so, we should change the concept of the word because the more leaves a child fills with his strokes the more he will be enjoying and more he will be learning.
It is as if a child who is learning to speak and after two years says "toche", instead of a car, someone tells him that he speaks badly. It is not that he speaks badly, he is two years old and therefore speaks like a two-year-old child. So, for age, he does well (imagine also the consequences that a two-year-old child may have to hear someone say about him speaking badly).
To be continue
Today I do not want to extend more, so go around the message that I have left today and tomorrow we continue with more tips to get our children do not want to sit and draw, but prefer to do other things that motivate them more.
Photos | Plindberg, Bberlin2010 on Flickr
In Babies and more | The importance of artistic expression, Keys to interpreting children's drawings, Educating creativity: imagination is one of the best toys that exist
