Every year we like to ask the children to draw a picture of themselves. This year I said that I was very grateful to be their teacher and that I would love to have a picture of them to hang up.
A child's self-portrait can reveal many things. As with any drawing, it shows the development of a child's fine motor, observation, and focusing skills. The children painted these portraits without a mirror to look at. You can see eyes, eye color, hair, facial expressions, and from the drawing there are clues about self concept and body awareness. The ability to draw a whole body with many parts is in itself a developmental and cognitive skill. If your child's self portrait does not look complete yet, it will be soon!
We gave the children choices in colors in tempera paints after they drew their picture with a sharpie. A lot of art at this age is about process, not product, and you can see that there was some mixing of paint colors, splashes, brush strokes painting over and over the paper, and shapes and splatters.
In every drawing you can see all of the energy and focus that goes into a wonderful child's self portrait!
As we were talking about being a member of our classroom, or a "citizen", we had a talk about what it meant to be a "comforter" in the room. The children knew that having the responsibility of being the comforter meant that you could help someone who was feeling sad or bad. Some of the things that we decided the comforter could do to help were:
- Ask "do you want to play?"
- Ask "how can I help?"
- Ask "are you okay?"
- cheer them up
- tell them knock knock jokes
- take them to the teacher to see if they're okay
We are very proud of the citizens of this classroom! They have a sense that they can be powerful helpers, and express some true words and actions.
Until Next Time,
Michele
No comments:
Post a Comment