Monday, April 28, 2014

2nd Grade - Making Mistakes

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!








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