Though I admit that I do hope Vivian can turn out to be a person who can draw decently when she grows up, frankly I don’t really know how to teach her to draw at all. All I know is our house is full of her drawing/painting stuff since she was born. She has too many sets of coloured pencils, crayons, felt pens, watercolours, stamp pens, finger painting bottles, pads, blackboards, whiteboards, rolls of paper, brushes, and the list goes on……This was probably because of me, my blindness and my secret selfish wish upon her.

The report from her Childcare teachers were quite positive about her interest in drawing, saying that “she loves drawing” or “once it was for painting, she was there”. I don’t have enough experience to tell to what extend I should take their comments seriously or maybe this is just what every kid does at her age.

Probably because I don’t know “how”, I just let her to do whatever she likes. She scribbles a lot in the beginning and now I can see she starts to draw with a certain idea in her mind, such as a fish, a bubble, a flower, a bird or a butterfly. Sometimes, she drew something then explained to me “look mummy, a baby”. I looked, it looked nothing more than an irregular shape of a series of random lines.

I did teach her to follow lines and shapes to draw things, but most of time, she completely went off the plan. According to my observation, her hands just don’t listen to her mind at all. I suppose this is the so-called vision-motor coordination skills that I have had done quite a bit research when I was doing my school psychology 15 years ago. Well, I almost forgot about it.

However, she is getting more and more precise and gaining more and more control. I have two interesting observations recently that I can cite.

One is I found that she can draw with a bigger “view”. One day she drew on the blackboard, she drew the big and continuous circles with a chalk covering the entire board with her arm movement which was really amazing. It is a sign of more confidence and certainty, as I have seen a lot of small children in the past who only tend to draw tiny pictures on a big piece of paper.

The second was I recently had a look at the picture wall in her childcare room, where it has cotton buds drawings from all the kids in her room. My first impression of Vivian’s drawing among all the other bold pieces was it is very plain and not very eye-catching at all, but when I closely examined, I found her drawing is quite clean and tidy with only dots on it, other than any excessive random lines or patchwork-liked smudges. It means that she is getting better manipulating her drawing tools to fulfil a certain purpose.

If you are interested, here is an article explaining kid’s different drawing stages from a point of view of psychology. I found it very interesting.

I guess I still don’t know how to teach her to draw, but I have decided to try my best to devote myself to draw WITH her, as well as give her plenty of opportunities and time to experiment and make a big MESS

P.S. I am normally not very tolerant to this type of mess but I think I have improved a lot in adjusting my attitude since I became a parent:-)