Drawing and coloring with your children
The simple acts of drawing and coloring are literally childs’ play, however, they both play an important role in your child’s physical, emotional and cognitive development. Like no other activity, the hobby of drawing and coloring allows young children to express themselves and their emotions, experience autonomy and build their confidence.
Parents and caregivers such as teachers and grandparents can promote the hobby of drawing and coloring as a way to improve physical, social, emotional and cognitive development-and to have a lot of fun along the way too. Here are some suggestions:
1. Provide your grandchildren with nontoxic drawing materials, blank sheets of paper and coloring pages.
2. Model drawing by example. Show children that you like to draw and color too - make designs but do not show your children what they should draw.
3.Encourage all drawing and coloring activity and efforts by talking about the beautiful colors, the lines and shapes the child has made.
4. Rather than ask, “What have you drawn?,” say “Tell me about your drawing”.Asking “What is that?” suggests to the child that he may have failed to draw the image correctly.
5. Talk about issues such as thin or thick, or the concept of wide, narrow, dark, light, edge, shape, contour, etc.
6. Display their art on the kitchen fridge, in their room and in places where visitors to your home will see them. Point them out to visitors - the praise for the work will boost a child’s self esteeem and confidence.
7. Give children the freedom to choose the subjects of their drawings and of their coloring sheets. Some argue that coloring sheets do little to foster children’s creativity - however they play a pivotal role in developing a child’s fine motor skills - a pre-cursor to writing - and often encourage children who wouldn’t otherwise draw and color to pick up a crayon to color in their favourite character. For example little girls may enjoy coloring images of fairytale princesses while boys enjoy coloring images of favourite characters such as Pokemon or Spongebob Squarepants and at sites like Spongebob Coloring Pages you’ll find many free Spongebob coloring Always supervise younger children while they draw and color - crayons pose a choking risk.
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