Child Observation Presentations

Week 5
  
             My classmates presentations were very interesting to observe. I got the opportunity to see how different children differed from each other when making art. The examples provided demonstrated how different theories tied into how children made decisions when drawing. I saw many of Lowenfeld's stage theories in the presentations as well as my child observation. Seeing how each child produced an art piece made me realize how accurate some of the theories learned in class actually are. One of the things that caught my attention was the presence of the ket aesthetic in almost every presentation. I realize how the media out there influences children's artistic creativity. Personally, I don't think of it as being particularly bad but I do see some cons to this aspect. If children are just drawing what they see from day to day, they aren't fully experiencing their unique imagination. One of my classmates brought up an important point. What if the child grows out of their interest to a particular cartoon they've been drawing over and over again? Based on my classmates experience, he noticed that Dragonball was the only thing he was good at drawing. When he finally grew out of that interest, he realized that all the time he spent perfecting that style of drawing affected him in his later years because he didn't get to practice drawing other things. His artistic ability came to a halt.  A thought I came up with based on this experience was to make children explore drawing other things as well. There should be a time for them to draw out of pure interest but also they should learn technique as well so they don't fall behind. 
                 Based on my child observation, I learned how the presence of a friend might also affect the way a child draws. When I was observing my child, I realized that at first she was a little tense because she couldn't really talk to me about her interests. Once her friend showed up, she loosened up and became more talkative and she also began drawing freely. This made me realize that as educators, depending on the age we are teaching, we should make an effort and try to connect with our students by researching their interests and dropping hints about them every once in a while, while we teach. This not only makes them realize that we think their interests are important, but they'll be more engaged in what we are teaching.

               Based on my personal experience while conducting the child observation, I picked out this image because it focuses on the importance of collaboration when drawing. Tying this image back to the Ivashkevich article, I also realized that collaboration makes children take ideas from each other as inspiration. A child might take an idea from a friend but it might have a different context than the original drawing. As an educator, if I ever get the opportunity to teach elementary, I will definitely emphasized collaboration in my art classroom. I believe that it might also lower the chance of children drawing from ket. When they have each other to explore different art topics, they might get to explore other things than media when making art.