Representing What We See

 

A large part of Early Learning is the ability to transfer what we see around us into some form of physical representation. The children are given many opportunities through the year to recreate things they see in their world using different mediums, such as pencil/paper, acrylic and tempra paints, play clay and play dough.

We had many chances during the year to work on this concept with the children. We introduced various mediums, talked about what we saw and how we might go about transferring what we saw into a graphic representation. Topics such as colors, shapes, and textures were all discussed in terms of their value to the project. The caterpillar project was a great opportunity for the children to watch first hand, the process of two live caterpillars turning into butterflies. We took this opportunity to learn about the changes that took place and what our caterpillars look like. We transferred our observations to paint and paper using various colors and different shaped sponge rollers to represent just what we saw!

The most important lesson we learned through all of our projects was that each child has unique talents and gifts and each child was indeed a true artist! Putting a value on theirs individual works by displaying them for the school community to enjoy showed the children how important their learning is to everyone! We used our digital camera to take pictures of the process and then document the pictures on the bulletin board outside our classroom! To finish off the project, the children took pictures while we set the butterflies free!