It seems like too often I’m approached by a student who
tells me they messed up and need to start over, so we took some time with our
younger students to talk about art and problem solving. I explain it like this: when you sit down to draw something, you have
a bunch of little problems to solve.
What am I going to draw?
Where am I going to put it? What
is it going to look like? How am I going
to draw it?
We run into problems when we don’t work hard to figure these
questions out. So for this project, the
second graders made mistakes (on purpose), and then had to figure out how to
fix them on their way to the completed drawing.
Every once in a while I would give the signal “Oops!” and the kids would
close their eyes and make a mark on their paper, not knowing exactly where it
would go. When they looked down at it
they had to figure out what to do with it – whether that meant turning that
mark into something else or covering it up with something else. It was very encouraging to hear students
working through their problems. Here a
few examples of finished work. I bet you
can’t tell where all the mistakes came from!
