Quick Tip - Coloring inside the lines

When my daughter was three she attended a daycare for a couple hours a week. One day she came home and was distressed about coloring inside the lines. The "teacher" said she shouldn't "scribble" and needed to "color inside the lines." Needless to say I was upset... and thus today's post!

If you are the parent of a preschooler, let him/her color anyway she/he wants to color. Just the manipulation of and basic hand-eye coordination used when coloring with crayons/markers/pencils is a good start for children this age. Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT push the "color inside the lines" bit.. that will come with age and maturity.

Teachers, if you teach in the primary grades (K-3) your students likely have many opportunities to color. This goes back to an earlier post about art vs. skill-focused projects... If the purpose of the coloring sheet is to work on eye-hand coordination and controlling writing utensils by all means, teach them how to color inside the lines. INSIST that they try their best to "stay inside the lines." However, if you are NOT teaching a skill, and the child is coloring for the sake of coloring or to create a piece of art, let them color however they wish. Let them express themselves while they are still young enough to feel good about their coloring regardless of how "messy" you as the adult view it. (You never know if you have the next Jackson Pollock in your room and you would hate to stifle his/her creativity at such an early age!!)

With that said... simply saying "color inside the lines" or "stay inside the lines" is NOT teaching the children a skill. You need to demonstrate coloring. You need to "think out loud" while you color on the board or on an overhead. Walk around the room and give one-on-one assistance to your students. Then.... have days where they can color for colorings sake... for the sake of being a child... cuz dagnabit sometimes it does feel good to just SCRIBBLE!!!

Quick Tip - Art vs. Skill-Focused-Projects

Quite often people who work with children confuse art and skill-focused-projects as the same thing. (There are a plethora of skills, but for today's post I am referring to skills usually associated with art.) Each have their place within a classroom or home setting but they are NOT the same and therefore the terms should NOT be used interchangably. In my classroom I not only teach them separately (although many projects are a combination of both) but I use those two terms with the children so they can learn the difference.

Skills: following directions, cutting, cutting along a line, glueing, coloring INSIDE the line, drawing straight lines, drawing shapes, etc.

Skill Focused Projects: a classic example of a skill focused project that is often confused as "art": handing children pieces of construction paper with pre-drawn lines on them, telling the students to cut out the objects on the paper, and glue the cut pieces of paper together... all of the students end up with almost identical "creations"...snowmen, frogs, teddy bears, lions, etc.; the only difference is the quality of cutting, glueing, and placement of the glued papers. I am not anti skill-focused-projects; they have a place in a child's development and should be used (in fact I will post some good ideas for those I have used in future posts), but DO NOT CALL THE END RESULT OF THESE PROJECTS "ART"!

Art: any activity where children can use self expression to create something. Yesterday's post about music art, is art... they used self expression to create drawings or paintings. Another example of art is giving students modeling clay and allowing them to mold/sculpt it into something, and depending on the type of clay used, they can also paint it once it has dried. It is okay and in fact good to teach skills while completing art projects, if children ASK for some pointers it is okay to provide some feedback and guidance...but let each student's art be a creation of their own. Sometimes it may be hard to stop yourself from saying something when you see a child using a medium in a way that is different to you, but bite your tongue and allow them to explore (provided they are not ruining furniture or the medium itself so it cannot be used again in the future when applicable). That is the best way for them to learn.

Here are a couple of books I have used either as is, or as a springboard for other SKILL-FOCUSED projects (yes I know that the one says art activities...but you now know better):




Here is a book I have used either as is, or as a springboard for other ART projects:




Happy Projecting!!!