Friday, September 30, 2011

Coloring Outside the Lines

As you may know, I teach kindergarten and first grade as a special education teacher for children with hearing loss. When I'm not pulling my small group of children out for reading instruction, I'm helping them inside of their general education homeroom.

There's a lot of coloring and drawing involved in Kindergarten. Some kids are really good at coloring inside the lines. They have strong fine motor skills. Other kids..... scribble. They often use only one color crayon and go to town! Part of this is that they're developmentally not ready to color inside the lines yet.

So I kind of wince a little every time their teacher urges them to "Color inside the lines! See? Like this!"

Plus the artist inside of me wants to encourage as much colorful rebellion as possible :)


Do you have kids? How do you react to scribbles? 

Linking up with Casey today!
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5 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 30, 2011 at 6:54 AM

    Yes, I have a two year old so he mostly does just scribbles and I love them! I think it's important to let them create and learn with their own imagination. Some of my favorite times are spent coloring with him! ;-)

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  2. LittleGreenThreadSeptember 30, 2011 at 7:41 AM

    Jackson colors every square inch of the page he is working on, and all in the same color. He is very particular about things, so I figure that's where it come from. His need for it to be complete and one color :) I love it, because I can see his little personality coming out in his artwork.

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  3. MeelingSeptember 30, 2011 at 8:47 AM

    Scribbling is about all I ever get from the 3 year olds in our class. :-)

    I love it...it's their personality coming out on paper!! My favorite is when they have a color preference and will only color with that crayon. This year I have two...one who loves purple and then one who loves orange! I always know who's paper they belong to! :-)

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  4. MeganSeptember 30, 2011 at 9:13 AM

    I love when parents + teachers teach children to do their own thing. I enjoy coloring inside and outside the lines, because people taught me that both are correct.:)

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  5. Judy EdmondsSeptember 30, 2011 at 7:19 PM

    My son had (has, actually) fine motor problems so, in a sense, trying to colour within the lines was a necessary skill for him to learn - but it made me so mad that his Prep teacher got more riled up about his inability to do so, than the fact that he got the questions on the worksheet right!!! And I despise colouring within the lines unless someone CHOOSES to do so!!

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