Little artists

Julia has loved her first week back to preschool, and likes both her new classmates and new teachers. She brought home some artwork she'd made in class, and it seems she is using art as a means to express her current fears:


"This is a spider. And do you know what kind of spider? A BLUE TARANTULA! I didn't know how to draw the back legs so I just drew the front legs."


"This is a big hurricane and that's a little bird trying to fly away from the storm!"

I must say, though, she is getting braver and bolder every night; last night she even dared to fall asleep with her head out of the blanket:


In your FACE, Blue Tarantula!

Madeleine also tried her hand at artwork today. I gave her a piece of paper and, after demonstrating how to color with a crayon, I let her have a turn. She seemed to understand the concept, but had trouble holding the crayon at the proper angle to actually make a mark on the paper:



So before long she gave up on that and resorted to whacking the crayon against the paper like it was a drumstick. I thought maybe a marker would be easier to color with, since she wouldn't need to apply as much pressure to the paper as necessary with a crayon. I tried handing her a blue marker, but she didn't attempt to color with it. She did, however, hold it out to show me while saying "Sssheeit":



And then she decided to hold it by the tip, thereby coloring her hands blue, so the marker went away and we switched back to the crayon. After another futile attempt to draw on the paper, she decided maybe it would work better in her mouth:



After I discouraged her from sucking on the crayon, she decided to ditch it all together and instead opted to play a game of peek-a-boo with the piece of paper:




So, yeah, not exactly a budding artist yet, but not bad for a first attempt...