Drawing with Children

We've begun! I've been wanting to start Drawing With Children with the kiddos for a VERY long time now, and we're all really excited about it. We've been doing it for a few weeks now, but are moving sloooowly, trying to build up Will's confidence (I don't know why, but she's convinced herself that her sister is the "artist" between the two of them, and has no patience for her own work yet). We spent one day testing out every paper and marker in the house to decide what we'd be working with--

We've chosen Blick newsprint, black fine point Sharpies, and Prismacolor double-ended markers.

 --another day copying and practicing the five shape families--

--and now we're going to spend a few weeks doing the recommended warm-up exercises as part of our daily mental work, until we're very familiar with using the materials and copying and creating the five shape families; I download and print endless copies of these blank masters of the warm-up exercises (Thank you, Mama Jenn!) for us to use. Through this week, I had been asking Matt to create the key for each of the exercises, but even with him trying to keep it simple, Will got pretty frustrated (her sister's work was BETTER, she insisted, despite my repeated reminders there is no self-loathing nor judgmentalism in Drawing with Children).

So for next week, I think that I'll have each child create the key figure for her sister's pages. Despite what Will thinks, they're both at the same skill level, so they shouldn't be able to over-challenge each other, and then they'll be doing different work, so there's no direct comparison necessary.

And once they can each do a week of warm-ups without tears, perhaps we can move on to an actual lesson!