It's Art; Let Them Do It

On Saturdays, we do a family specials program that the kids love. We do gym, art, and music in quick succession. It's metered out to a toddler's attention span. For an adult, well, it's quick enough to make your head spin.

Anyway, during the art portion, they set up small, fun projects for the kids to do. One strange thing I noticed? The parents are doing the projects. Why? The teachers are encouraging this, too. I don't get it.

They had the parents "help" the kids paint a yellow sun the other day. They had the parents put the sun's eyes in place. They had the parents glue a yarn smile on the sun.

I had my kids do it. Our suns looked just like everyone else's...almost.

 

Are their smiles as bright and even as the others? No, not quite. Are their eyes in the right spot and perfectly separated? Nope. Is their yellow smoothly painted with no mess? Absolutely not. But they did it. All by themselves.

And the noses? Everyone in that class had a sun with the nose because my girls looked at the completed craft and said, "Hey, where's the nose?"

"Great point," said the teacher. She brought out those puffs and noses were had by all.

Would any of the other kids come up with that since their parents were doing their projects for them? Maybe. But they didn't.

This is not to say I think doing your kids' projects is wrong or bad, but, personally, I want these little things as keepsakes. I want the girls to look back on them in 10 years when they go through storage boxes and see exactly what they did -- by themselves -- at three.

They hung them up in their room by themselves, too. Well, almost. I did the tacking part, but they picked out the spots and held their suns for me.

Beautiful!

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