About once a week we try to do some art from the Artistic Pursuits curriculum. The artist lessons are interesting and the art task is fairly simple. So why does it bring so much complaining? These boys are so hard on them selves. I'm happy with what ever they come up with. I'm usually very impressed at the creations but good golly the process is a painful one. It usually starts from the second the pencil meets the paper. They instantly get upset, try to erase, flip the paper over, try again and get up set again. We go through at least a couple of pieces of water color paper per child before they are convinced it's OK and they can proceed. It's painful to see them struggle with something that seems like it should be fun. I juggle encouraging them one at a time to continue on and that it really does look OK. Finally, they get a good start and most of the time they are happy in the end with what they produced. Once in while, like today, the paper does not get finished and it's tossed and life goes on.
I've leaned something about the oldest child. I've always know he's a visual guy and sees great detail all the time but I just realized today that it can be a great obstacle when trying to create something simple. If you don't see simple it's hard to produce simple and if you don't have the skills to produce details the way you want them it's terribly frustrating.
I can remember a time when he was in Kindergarten and we took a short winter vacation close by. The hotel had a pool and later when asked to draw something about our time at the pool he spent a good amount of time drawing tiny little squares all together. He became quite tired of the task and left the page mostly empty but I knew what he was drawing. He was drawing the tile floor around the pool. The tiles were probably 2x2 or 4x4 squares of a cream color. Can you imagine what it's like to have that much detail get processed through your brain every minute of everyday?
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