How to Make Drawing Absorbing, or Keeping a Diary together with a One Year Old

Our 1-year-old Soniya loves felt-tip pens – to take them out from the package, to take the caps off and then to try to put them on again, to push the felt pens into the package again. But she is interested in drawing itself only for a minute. And drawing is very useful for the development of image-bearing thinking, aesthetic perception, sense of colour and space…

Once, when we were in our village house waiting together with the daughter until the rain stops, I thought out the following (it was impossible to avoid drawing as I had taken neither toys nor books to the village house from the city and it was not wise to walk under the rain): I started describing our previous day for Soniya drawing the images-illustrtions with the felt-tip pens at the same time. Our daughter was obviously interested. Not only was she listening to me but she was also drawing something over my images, voiced the pictures as if remembering something, told me something in her own language… We were drawing in such a way for 10-15 minutes and even did not notice when the rain stopped.

“Do you remember the cock we saw in the morning? Yes, yes, it was going among the grass and flowers. We were near the river. Who lives in the river? The fish.And there was the sun above us…”

On coming back home I added this developing activity to our daily life. And what was the result? The baby’s speech and memory are developing, he/she learns new words, we express ourselves through such creative activity, show our love to the baby. Sometimes, before starting drawing with Soniya, I showed her the photos of the previous or that day, explaining to her what was depicted their and listening to her “answers”. I bought a big pack of felt-tip pens: 6 colours were obviously not enough for the development of the sense of colour. Now, I also write what is depicted in our pictures on the back of it. And then I put the most interesting works into a folder – a present for our daughter in the future

“What did we do in the evening? Playing with an orange balloon. It was flying high above the flowers. Where the birds sing on the trees…”

By the way, it is not very important whether the parent can draw. I have read in the papers of the masters of pedagogy and saw it in my own parent practice that it is not important for the child whether the picture looks like reality. The baby thinks with different images and for us, parents and teachers, is not very right to try to impose our stereotypes on children killing by it their individuality. So, it is quite all right if the cherries/dogs/houses will be drawn in such a way as you are able to draw them nd each time differently A friend of ours having started to draw with his children and for them even changed his profession from a physicist-mathematician into a painter-writer .

“Who have we seen today? Right! A dog. And there also was a butterfly. It was flying from flower to flower making with its wings like this…”

With more adult kids you can keep a similar diary in the following way: ask the child what interesting things he noticed during the day and then make a picture/appliqué work/image from clay together with him based on that event.

Anastasia

Illustrations to the Article

The pictures by the author and her daughter are used as the illustrations for this article.

For this article in Russian, please, visit here.

Next time you will learn what the bottle of roll-on deodorant can be used for…