Repetition and Representation

I have had the pleasure of watching G as she explores representing her mother through painting and drawing.  It probably is not finished, but the way that her representation changed this last week really struck me.

From the first days of preschool, she was painting a simple version of her mom.

She explored her mother one morning in watercolors, painting her over and over again.  Each of the scans above also has a painting on the back.

The representation shifted a week ago when we introduced book writing at morning meeting.  G got up from meeting and immediately went to the pre-made books and created this.

A few days later, I observed her as she drew at the whiteboard easel:

The representation has shifted, and different details are important to G.  The drawing in the book and on the whiteboard are similar, just as all of the previous paintings were.  How long will G work on this representation of her mother?  

In the incredibly wonderful Its Not a Bird Yet, Ursula Kolbe shares ideas about depicting people and animals:

"...early figure drawings show few details.  A circular shape can stand for a head, face, the hair, and at first a torso with arms as well.  Children's representations are pictorial equivalents of things - not attempts to make realistic copies.  They know far more than they convey in a drawing...children's drawings are not 'printouts' of what they know." (2005, p. 17).

G knows much more about her mother than she is sharing here.  But a combination of learning about materials and how to use them to represent her mother plays a role here.  For me, one of the most interesting moments in my observations of G's work representing her mother was when we were using clay, and she rolled out a snake shape and bent it in half.  "That reminds me of your mother's hair, in your drawings!" I said to her.  She looked at me very seriously and said, "No, this is a horseshoe."  That moment could have gone either way, with her beginning to make a representation of her mother out of clay, or choosing not to use that medium to explore the representation.  In my mind, making that proposal was going to set us off on an exploration of representing people with clay.  But, it was neither the time nor the place for that conversation or activity.

I'm interested to see what G creates on paper this week, and to see if she decides that another medium is worth exploring!

It's not a bird yet

"Just as infants constantly practice making sounds, so young drawers fill sheets with shapes which may seem very similar. Yet when you compare markings of even only a few days apart, you will notice differences."

-ursula kolbe-

The information in It's Not a Bird Yet: The Drama of Drawing is nothing shocking or new. But Ursula Kolbe takes children's drawing experiences and slows them down, and looks at each time a child draws as a full experience.

After finishing the book, I made it a point to slow myself down a bit this week and watch and listen to drawing experiences in the classroom. At one point in the book, Kolbe talks about children as "pattern makers". That term makes me think of A-B-A-B patterns - lining up colored beads or animals. But to a child, a pattern is the label for something that repeats. So perhaps it is that A-B-A-B pattern that we have in mind, but it might be a sun with lines coming out everywhere, or vertical lines down a page over and over again. Two children were talking about patterns in the classroom on Tuesday - one was tracing flower petals onto a group mural and invited the other one: "Look at my pattern!" Her friend responded, "I love your pattern! Can I help with it?" They traced flower petals together, with a complete understanding of what the pattern was.

A second part that I felt I experienced this week was imaginative play and drawing as one. Kolbe says, "drawing...by many young children -- is about actions and events in time. It's not about making a picture of how things look." On Wednesday, one girl spent ten minutes drawing a curved shape, and then coloring it in with a crayon. While she was filling it in, she talked and sang about princesses, ghosts, parties, animals, sharks, and splashing water. Although her finished drawing was a simple shape, there was so much more to it.

I love reading a book like this. I spent a few evenings looking at the photos, reading the text, and going back to favorite sections. This is a nice book for an experienced teacher or a novice one. She comes from the point of view of an artist who loves to work with very young children, which is quite unique. Plus her work here is concentrated on one- to six-year-olds. In my school, I feel like a lot of attention is put on reading and writing for first and second graders in our center, so we don't get to talk about things like the drawings the children are making throughout the building. I'm talking about this book to the early childhood faculty on Monday, and I'm pretty sure I'll be lending my copy around for a while.

I think I'll be picking up a copy of Rapunzel's Supermarket: All about Young Children and Their Art now - that is Kolbe's first book. She really has a way of slowing down children's experiences and seeing each moment as important. And her work is really about children being children, and us watching and supporting as needed.

What are you reading right now?