SOLSC #9 Trusting children

I continue to be immersed in the fabulous Jacob Lawrence art project with the Phillips Art Gallery....

I find myself thinking all the time about how to break it down into small doable steps, so that the work is truly done by the children.

I wrestled with how to do our second panel.  This one is a "zoom in," an up close and personal image of a D.C. metro train...to illustrate "how we travel to school."

I decided that we would start with a "contour drawing" of a train, and fill it in with small child-cut pieces of wallpaper...a collage image of the metro.  To give the collage a little more impact and dimension, the children would create it on a piece of foam board.

It would be a challenge for me, but I could draw the image...and then have the children decorate what I drew.  Yes!  I'll find a bunch of images of the D.C. metro on the internet...I'll study these and make my sketch.  This is my best way to draw - I do best when I draw what I see.  This will work.

But, another voice creeps into my head - Maureen, take yourself out of the equation!  Let the panels be authentically three year olds' art.

How to do that?

How about putting the same D.C. metro photographs in front of the children, and letting them draw?  What will the children produce?

I did it.  I listened to my internal voice, the one challenging me to let the children do.  I put the same photos of metro trains in front of a small group of children working in the art center. They tried to draw what they saw.  Funny, most of them didn't even glance at the photographs.  "Oh, I know what the metro train looks like!" The results were fantastic!

Together, we chose one of their drawings to use as the basis of our panel:

This art project is teaching me to trust children more.  

This art project continues to fill me with awe.