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Saturday 12 November 2011

Integration of Art and Writing Skills

Tell me how many children throw a tantrum when you ask them to write the same alphabets again and again. Here is a way S integrated art and writing skills, created a fun experience for himself.

Few days back, we did some tape resist painting and S enjoyed it so much. I admired his poised attitude during the process. When I posted our tape resist painting, Mommy Labs connected with our activity and remembered how they enjoyed tape resist arts. They bonded again to come up with some beautiful tape resist paintings. S got inspired by one of their paintings that had intricate black colored designs. An idea that triggered in his mind after viewing those pictures is to doodle Kannada ( an Indian language) alphabets in the un-taped spaces. And here, he came up with an artful Kannada alphabets.


So, now we know that not only is art healing, colourful and fun, it also helps children integrate learning. Writing has not been that easy for him in his early years just as it is to any other child. Though he writes and reads English very well nowadays, any kind of alphabets writing when we try to explore other languages, reminds him of the difficult days he went through in his early years. 

He used to always be scared for being a slow writer. He even came up with an idea during this activity to address that. He started playing 'start-stop', a fun game that he invented. The game is to watch the time he took to complete each un-taped area. He loudly counted the number of seconds it took for him to write an alphabet in one un-taped area. This helped him develop a timing sense too and most important, he was giggling throughout the time. 

I realized that integration of learning with something that the children love to do will ease their fear and help them maximize their potentials with grace. 

Enjoy Learning and Sharing

2 comments:

  1. was waiting to see this since yesterday, just one word wowwww

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  2. I'd seen this post earlier and had loved it, Prabha! Infact, this post inspired us to go back and do some more tape resist.
    And yes, I so agree and have seen in our home - how art and literacy can work hand in glove. I especially love art journaling myself and have been doing for years. These days, Pari has taken to scrap-booking which again is a wonderful, playful way to juxtapose art and writing..

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