Observational drawing with children

Exploring art is one way to tap into how your child sees the world and to encourage them to make observations of the world around them. 

I love the sweet little things that children say. Things that make you realise they don't always see the world the same way as you. The Fairy calls INSET days (UK teacher training days) 'Insect days' (I like to imagine she thinking her teachers are learning about invertebrates!) Or the Frog shouting 'ball' when ever he sees anything round in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket.

Drawing at the same time as the kids draw is really fun (it's a tip I have picked up from one of favourite bloggers Rachelle at Tinkerlab). I really enjoy the shared experience of creating together. The kids seem more engaged and want to take part for longer. It's also a great way to model that art doesn't have to 'be' a certain way or to be perfect to have value.

Earlier on this week the Fairy and I got out some chalk pastels and drew some squashes.

Before we started I encouraged her to hold and feel the squash- talk about the shape and colour. We talked about what other things were the same colour - oranges, sweets and her friend's hair.

We then got drawing each with our own sheet of paper. She drew 3 (very orange) squashes.

She loved smudging the pastel to mix colours.

Unfortunately The Frog wanted to join in with the arty action when he got up from his nap and drew over all of our finished art work. I need to remember to put things on a higher shelf!

Language Links: colours, shape and size concepts. Developing comparative language (same as, different, like).

Autumn {Fall} Discovery bottle

I adore conkers, I love how they feel and how shiny they are when they first pop out of their case. So when we were in the park the other weekend I picked some up and put them in my pocket. The Fairy loves to play with them too. I do get a bit nervous about The Frog playing with them as they are 'choking size'.

As I was thinking about how he could play with them when I remember his love of discovery bottles- an Autumn (or Fall) bottle seemed a perfect solution. If you've not come across these before they are basically bottles with things in to discover! Older children can observe it and predict, younger ones can use it in a similar way to a rattle (or eat it). You can put anything that takes your fancy in them, the first one I eve made was for the Fairy when she was little (10 months)- its got glitter and coloured water in and still gets used today (and she's 4!). The Frog has one he adores with plastic beads (think he likes to make noise to compete with his big sis' chatting). I seal the top with a hot glue gun just to make sure it isn't going to get opened (I also make sure they are not played with unsupervised just in case they do).

To our base of conkers I added a small leaf, a fir cone and a cork (I know that's not strictly autumnal but it's a good colour and we had it in the kitchen).

As you can see from the photos The Frog loves waving it around. The Fairy likes to borrow it too.

Autumn fingerprint tree

On the way home from pre school, The Fairy asked 'Can we paint something with autumn leaves on Mummy?' My first thought was to do some leaf printing, but we've had so much rain the leaves here are soggy, sludgy heaps not crisp, crunchy, printable leaves.

Turns out, The Fairy had other ideas anyway ('No we should do one like our pink flower tree'). Perfect I thought, The Frog can join in too - he loves a spot of finger painting (well banging his hands on the table covered in paint!). Unfortunately the Frog decided to have a mega nap so he missed out on the painting action, but here's what my big girl and I got up to...

Mixing paint. We used poster paint (here's an affiliate link in blue to some paint just in case you want to buy some more - if you choose to buy the paint we get a small commission at no extra cost to you).

Leaves

The owl was a spontaneous hand print (with some added paper and pen extras!)

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