What's Important Here? 

(or, Process or Product?)

I firmly believe the process is the most important part of art education. That being said, just what is the process, what does it look like and why is it important?

When I see a child working at the art table, head bent over her work, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she works to get that piece of her collage in exactly the right place or with his brow furrowed deeply as he concentrates on making the sharpie in his hand produce just the right mark on the paper I have to wonder what children think of the whole Process vs. Product debate in Early Childhood. When children invest themselves in their work they want something they can take pride in when they are done. Not that children don't spend a large amount of time experimenting with materials - they do. However, part of that experimentation must, at some point  result in a product. Will that product be something that is important to them? Important enough to warrant the effort of making sure her name is attached?

Zainab concentrates intensely on where to glue the green bead string

At the time I was going through my Early Childhood degree, the Process vs. Product debate was definitely leaning heavily toward the Process side. I spent a lot time and effort to make sure my art area was stocked with as many different textures, colors and media as possible and took the "step back and watch" approach to all things art-related. Then Popcorn Patti walked into our classroom. She was still in school, just finishing her degree and she had different ideas.

"We're having an art show for the preschool at the College" she announced.  "I think we should do one here too".

"OK, what are we going to show" I wondered. The children were producing a lot of marks of various shapes and colors on paper of various textures and sizes. They were gluing many and varied objects to pieces of cardboard but in our Process oriented classroom, there really wasn't much if anything to display in an Art Show, but Patti convinced us that our kids had it in them to create works of great beauty and significance. It started with Cats vs. Dogs.

"If you were going to draw a dog, how would you start?" I heard Patti ask a group of children as I walked in to the morning session to relieve my co-teacher for a few minutes. I thought about it - I am certainly no artist and I didn't have a clue how I would draw a dog. "I can't draw a dog", "me too" "yeah, I can't make a dog" the responses were unanimous, "we're not big enough to draw a dog!". "Well, let's just draw his face", Patti suggested. "Can you make a circle?" Well, of course, most could make a circle and those that weren't sure quickly had it perfected. "Can you make a triangle like this? here and here..." As she walked the children though some simple marks and coached them on placement they began to look at their papers in amazement - "hey, that's not a dog, that's a cat!" exclaimed Ali accusingly. "Oh dear", sighed Patti,  "you're right", how could we make a dog?" The children offered a few suggestions and they tried again, this time producing a face that was clearly recognizable as a friendly pup. "You are planning to do this with the afternoon group too, right" I queried? I could see the kids were excited and I had to admit, I wanted to be able to draw a dog too!

Over the course of the year we worked on drawing simple shapes and using them to produce recognizable objects in pictures. We bought real clay and worked on making pinch pots and coil baskets. We encouraged some structure to collages when we showed the kids how to use the existing colors in a cut out picture and then echo those colors in the objects used to surround the picture. At the end of the year we had an Art Show. The children were excited to show off their work and the parents could see what their children had been learning through the activities they had been wondering about all year.

The direction given was - draw a plan and then use the materials to make what you drew.

Since that year I have dug deeper into the importance of art experiences for children. We started incorporating Art across the curriculum and we began finding ways in which to show our students that their creations were important and worth the time they were investing. We introduced a permanent Art Gallery in the hall. Each child had his own space with his name permanently attached where he could display his own work. We also had group displays where a pretty, embroidered tablecloth attached to the wall was used to display collective works. We began to introduce the children to representational painting or "Still Life". It is amazing what a three-year-old can do with a few simple instructions, some orange and brown paint and a small pumpkin to look at.  We began to expect that children would create work that they were proud of and we started collecting their work to keep in portfolios that were shared with parents at conference time with the kids explaining to their parents what they were learning through their work.

Holly is trying to decide if her pumpkin is big enough or if she needs to add more paint

Still Life Paintings of a Gingerbread Beanie Baby. Part of our study on the story of The Gingerbread Man. 

Art  and creative expression is a part of who we are. It is vital to our development and without it our development is stunted. Over the last 15 years I have learned to incorporate art into every area of learning. In Science, we learn to observe and sketch the changes we notice as our tiny frog eggs change into frogs (yes, preschoolers can draw every stage in the cycle). In Math, we learn how to demonstrate that 2+2=4 by drawing it. In Language, we learn to draw pictures that tell a story and in Literature we learn how to draw pictures that extend the stories we are reading. As for Motor Development - well, that's a whole blog entry in itself! We learn about our communities and our environment through observation and how better to understand what a child is observing than to be able to see what he is representing creatively?

Representational Art - our paintings of frog eggs.

I believe that Art is about expression and creativity and exploration. It is about the Process, but if the Process never produces a product that children can take pride in and parents can understand, I believe we fall short of giving children all they need to succeed.

This Still Life was to encourage several boys to give representational painting a try. They agreed to do it if they could paint a picture of a car.

It Must be March - I Hear Frogs!

It's March - my favorite time of year is starting to creep into the corners of my woods. There is a different smell in March. It's a faintly sweet, earthy smell and when I sense it in early March, I know that Spring is just around the corner. I am never sure exactly which corner so I have to be ever on the lookout for signs. One sign is the daffodils that start to show themselves in various parts of the playground.

Parents built these bottomless planter boxes for along the fence out of cedar fencing boards.

When the daffodils start to show themselves it is time to go to the pond and gather frog eggs which form the foundation of our yearly classroom "Pond Project". We have done this project in our classroom every year for probably the last 6 or 7 years. I throw my muck boots in the car and stop by the drainage pond not far from my house. I put on my boots, open the big gate, slip through and wade out into the icy water. My hands ache from the cold as I gather ping-pong ball sized egg masses. I am the official "frog egg" gatherer for our organization so I must have enough to send to the other teachers that have requested them. This unassuming little wet-weather pond that has provided Pacific Tree frog eggs faithfully throughout the years - until this year. This year there was a chain and a lock on the gate. I live on 5 acres of swamp - finding frog eggs shouldn't be that hard... I convince the better half to go hunting with me & we finally find a pond with eggs... and a few other critters... 

Our Pond Study Center. Three different water habitats because we ended up with three different nymph species that wanted to eat each other! The fourth habitat is for the mature frogs.

This creature was particularly fascinating. He is a Dragonfly nymph. He only eats live prey so the kids named him "The Mean Guy"

We ended up with four of these odd little critters - Salamander nymphs! 

frog eggs

Snakes in the Classroom

 One of my students found a baby garter snake in his back yard and decided to share it with the class. Being firm believers in emergent curriculum, we hauled out the 10 gallon aquarium and set up a snake habitat. The kids were unsure of what kind of space a snake would like, so to be respectful, we looked in some books. We put sand down on the bottom of aquarium and put a little rock pond down in the sand so he could slither in to get a drink or have a bath. We found some dried leaves and some sticks outside and put those in the corner so he would have a place to hide and feel safe. Then we put in a shiny marble so he would have something to play with (no, the books didn't say anything about snakes needing toys but the children were sure it was a mistake that would be corrected in future printings)

Snake Study Table

The building box

The children have been enjoying the snake, they like to observe him and hunt earth worms for him so they can watch him eat. On Friday we decided we needed to highlight snakes in our classroom. We are reading some books with snakes in them - Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear and Baby Rattlesnake to name two - and we decided to focus on snakes in our representational art and in our discovery area. We moved the snake enclosure to its own table and included several resource books about snakes, a small basket of plastic snakes, a wooden box with rocks, driftwood, moss and evergreen branches and an assortment of magnifying glasses. We have been making snake houses and painting snake pictures and making snakes with playdough and just generally experiencing snakes (Hmm, maybe that is why a certain young man decided to "slither" down the hall and out the door to play outside today!)

Representational art - Three-year-old

This study on snakes has made the children more aware of their surroundings, especially when they are outdoors. They have taken on responsibility for another living thing and they take this responsibility very seriously. They check every day to make sure the snake has clean water and every day they hunt for food for Mr. Snake.

Building a Snake House