I’m a big fan of making and doing with my two year old daughter and we’ve been encouraging her to scribble, paint, stick and make things whenever possible. I like joining in, and it’s very therapeutic to stop the hard work and do something simple like making some animals or sharing a drawing, even if she’s only scribbling at the moment.
In fact, here’s a pledge I made on Odadeo about it:
This morning though, I was sitting with my laptop over breakfast (I know – bad geek dad behaviour – minus 10 points on Odadeo), and she started taking an interest in some of the pictures on the screen. So I asked “Would you like to draw an animal?” She said “Yeah”… “Which animal?”. “Bear!” was her reply…
The results after some creative direction along the lines of “Ear! Ear! Body! Nose! Rabbit! Robot! Pink! Yellow!” are pretty good I’d say – maybe I should make a series?
But seriously – my advice is to use whatever skills you have, and just drop the ‘I’m being a serious adult’ thing for five minutes from time to time and see what happens.
You may surprise yourself and delight your kids in the process.
Just wait. Sooner or later you find yourself with a 16 year-old, and you're looking over their shoulder while they use photoshop and you keep having to interject with 'Wow - how did you do that?!'
Making animals with kids
I’m a big fan of making and doing with my two year old daughter and we’ve been encouraging her to scribble, paint, stick and make things whenever possible. I like joining in, and it’s very therapeutic to stop the hard work and do something simple like making some animals or sharing a drawing, even if she’s only scribbling at the moment.
In fact, here’s a pledge I made on Odadeo about it:
I pledged this on Odadeo
This morning though, I was sitting with my laptop over breakfast (I know – bad geek dad behaviour – minus 10 points on Odadeo), and she started taking an interest in some of the pictures on the screen. So I asked “Would you like to draw an animal?” She said “Yeah”… “Which animal?”. “Bear!” was her reply…
The results after some creative direction along the lines of “Ear! Ear! Body! Nose! Rabbit! Robot! Pink! Yellow!” are pretty good I’d say – maybe I should make a series?
But seriously – my advice is to use whatever skills you have, and just drop the ‘I’m being a serious adult’ thing for five minutes from time to time and see what happens.
You may surprise yourself and delight your kids in the process.