I used to teach art to children as young as one. How do I teach art to a one-year-old? Actually, I do it the same way I teach any age. Very often my lesson plans position students—whether one year old or one-hundred-and-one—to make discoveries.This lesson plan is one of those.
I worked with a young art teacher who complained that our hip bosses at the creative preschool gave the kids too much freedom and not enough guidance. "There are rules in art," she said. And that's true. Experiential education still requires teaching. My young colleague wanted to teach the students how to mix secondary colors. Red and blue make violet—that sort of thing.
I said, "watch this lesson." I went outside and gathered driveway gravel, from minute pieces of crushed limestone to small pebbles. I then found a bunch of dead sticks of wood, smaller and larger, but all the right size for a child's hand. I filled empty coffee cans with red, blue, or yellow tempera and mixed in the gravel. I gave each of the children paper and set the tools out for them to create with.
One of my big assertions in teaching and practicing creativity is the importance of restraint and constraint—concepts I will write about in another post. Simply put, artists do well to restrict themselves, and these restrictions, self-imposed or from without, are important reasons for success. In other words, sometimes we do better with an impediment of some sort.
It was interesting to see how the children encountered their art when trying to "paint" and "draw" with sticks and stones. The new materials caused them to explore even more than usual and make some discoveries. Among these discoveries was color mixing. A number of the younger children hollered out to us their revelations about creating their own secondaries. "Yellow and blue make green," one child exclaimed. I love watching light bulbs turn on.
"We can tell them how to mix colors, and they'll get it," I told the other teacher. "But we can also set them up to make these discoveries on their own, and it's a very natural way to learn and wire the brain."
Here are some sand and gravel paintings my older students made.
