As humans, there are many ways of living, being and knowing peacefulness.  As parents and teachers, we can explore the concept of peace with our children by sharing many of the cultural stories, legends and narratives, not to mention artworks, songs and events based on peacefulness. Offering multiple ways of living, being and knowing peace can be translated into daily life as:

Think peace – Thinking peace can be along the lines of affirmations and thoughts we can say out loud in the presence of our children.  However, one of the most beautiful ways I have heard thinking peace explained is in the picture book, I Grow in Grandad’s Garden by Brian Andrew.  In the story, he sits in his garden with his granddaughter Ellie, and on the ‘think and thank’ seat they sit and listen and chat and ‘after a while you have more room in your head.  Grandad says that is what peace is.’

Say Peace:  Choosing peaceful words and a peaceful tone with others and ourselves – on a recent yoga and art retreat one of the participants shared a quote her mother always said,‘ it is the tone that make the music’ –unknown.  For children I say, ‘can you use your gentle voice with me, your sister, brother ‘etc pointing out that even when we feel frustrated or angry we can choose to speak softly and gently.

Do Peace:  ‘Be the Change you want to see in the world’ –Gandhi.  Doing our daily tasks in a peaceful way will teach our children to be peaceful too.  This might include letting your children witness your own acts of peace – I like to do a little yoga before bedtime with my kids watching on, or let them know that I am making time for peace when I am in the garden, walking along the beach or going to a night yoga class all by myself.  It also includes showing peace to others, waiting patiently in queues and talking about how my body and mind feels when I am being peaceful.

In a recent workshop, we explored what peace might look like and made special peace stones to share a little peace with others (we explored how the smooth stones made us feel as we made soft, circular motion with the stones over our faces and backs), we also discussed who we might like to share our peace stones with.  The children delighted in decorating the stones with paint pens and arranging the stones collectively in  patterns.

We also explored colours of peacefulness – the children decided on blue – we talked about the concept of how we could make various shades and tints of blue by adding different amounts of white to the blue and even a hint of black.  We also learnt about monochromatic colours too.  Not to mention the delicate and giant brush strokes we explored to the peaceful sounds of the harp and  flute.

In light of the recent media attention surrounding the budding four year old artist exhibiting her work in NY, I have not been able to stop thinking about this little girl and her rich experiences in the arts.  It also stirred in me the perspective of how every child should have this powerful experience regardless of whether you have a studio or not.  The backyard is a wonderful place to drip and splatter paint, to find objects to bury under the paint.

It also reminds me that in the Arts Education field , practitioners, teachers and artists have always encouraged curriculum, frameworks, assessment policies and teaching strategies to go far beyond the colouring in template or predetermined art work usually prescribed by a very capable adult.  The image below was captured in the early 90′s and has stayed with me since my teacher training days.  The  image is from an outstanding body of work around the visual arts elements and principles by Wendy Allen’s Running on Rainbows manual  funded by the Life Be In It: Brisbane  progam.

It is funny how years on this image is still largely a one off, but not at Scribble and Squiggles!  I am determined to provide as many opportunities to make the concept of ‘the living Chromacryl Kids’ an everyday for our children.

Taking inspiration from Herve Tullet’s amazing book ‘The Game of Mixed Up Art’, children have permission to engage in action drawings and paintings, intersecting lines, avoiding and delighting in high speed collisions of coloured lines and splashes of paint.  This activity engages the most spirited of children.

The ancient art of felting engages and relaxes children and adults alike.  Take simple raw wool, warm soapy water and friction, and colourful fibres can be wrapped around canvas boards, a collection of stones, turned into spacespaces, landscapes and just about any thing.  Children and adults love twisting, overlapping, curling into shapes, rolling, layering each piece of felt to create new forms.  The sensory fun was glorious, with hands soaping and smoothing, feathering and shaping each handmade felted piece.  Wrapping simple stones and rocks proved to be really fun as the children explored stones with beards, Rapunzel styled hair and painted embellishments.   When dry sheets of felted art can be cut and threaded into various shapes and sculptures or stretched over boards to create unique hanging scapes.

Exploring the translucent nature of artist quality watercolour paints, watercolour pencils and concepts like blending, bleeding, layering, tone and contrast not to mention the powerful collisions as we combined elephant shaped trunks with lion heads, flower and leaf shaped ears on animal bodies.

This moment of creative spontaneity was so much fun.  Drawing tiny expressions and people on fingers and toes can be a fun way to engage in the arts at any time of day.  After a few explorations each toe and finger person take on a particular voice, action and even become a  character in a toe or finger play.  The creative energy is contagious.

Printing is a wonderfully creative experience to explore with children.  Be it prints from found objects or nature or carved designs children delight in watching the original image appear on a different surface or with printing ink or paint.  One of the easiest ways to print with young children is to go on a nature hunt finding leaves and flowers of different sizes, textures and shapes, painting and pressing onto paper.  Children can arrange leaves to construct a composition – landscapes, people, animals and fantasy creatures.  When dry armed with a sharpie or oil pastel new art can emerge.

Alternatively, in the spirit of eco-art, we collect lots of styrofoam plates and packaging destined for landfill and use the humble biro to stratch in a design.  This technique is suitable for the smallest of hands.  Once image is cratched in quite deeply, I like to use a rubber roller and printing quality ink to ink up and print on paper.

Acetate sheets or hard plastic sheets are also great, with a needle point tool scratch in design, ink and print on paper.    Thumb prints are also lots of fun and great for making your own narrative.  Eraser prints are worth trying by simply carving lines and patterns into an eraser, press onto a stamp pad and print away.

Leaf Man is a great story to inspire your thoughts.

If you are lucky enough to live locally, you simply must visit the Perc Tucker Gallery to explore the amazing work of Jenny Orchard and her ‘Zookini’ inspired creations.  In the true spirit of ‘Zookini’ creatures, children in workshops explored their own hybrid creatures last week.  This term we will be continuing similar lines of inquiry by exploring  patterns and textures in leaves, plants, flowers, fruits and vegetables to inspire more hybrid creatures.    Simple leaf rubbings, nature cookie prints (wood discs) and bark prints will feature in our explorations.  Stay tuned to share our journey.

Nature provides everything a child needs… especially open ended explorations.  The children loved the freedom of thinking, dreaming, inventing, imagining and problem solving in the great outdoors today.   In what seemed a heart beat, hours passed as they collected, constructed and negotiated the structural and aesthetic qualities of the build.  Even more fun was had as they  reinvented  timeless childhood games to play in the natural space.  As they sleep tonight may their dreams be filled with inklings of new discoveries, games and fun to be had tomorrow.

“The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” says Marcel Proust from Patricia Ryan Madson’s amazing book Improv Wisdom.

It is not the first time in workshops that I have used this brilliant & printable template from Susan Striker’s website with children, but each time a child stretches their creativity, I see see the world with new eyes.  A template like this can stretch our children far beyond any regular colouring template.  I often wonder how we can encourage the ‘reschooling’ of schools to remove the regular colouring templates, interrogate the rigor of existing curriculum areas to embed creativity and problem solving across the curriculum.  The process of building ideas and turning ordinary objects into new things also encourages children to also see the world differently.

I’m sure everyone remembers using a straw to blow runny paint across a page… but this year in our workshops we developed this simple technique by blowing green paint over a white gift bag and looking for what the green paint blob could become.  Some turned their bag upside down and declared they had created a great Christmas monster, some made a Grinch, the beginnings of a reindeer, others the traditional Christmas tree.  They delighted in adding extra colour and textures to their designs to make the most creative designer gift bags.  The process really does encourage children to use their imagination and really see objects and things similar to the act of hunting for creatures in the clouds and one of my children’s favourite games to play in the car on a rainy day- raindrop races.  My children delight in watching individual raindrops race others as the motion of the car helps each whizz by.  They also love commentating the process as if it was the Melbourne Cup or V8 car race.

I have always loved the amazing images and tinkering behind the work of Saxton Freymann’s books “How are you Peeling” and “Dog Food”.  The clever selection of fruit and vegetables become amazing creatures displaying real emotions win over the hearts of children and adults alike.  This was the case at a recent art workshop.  Children and parents delighted in exploring and describing eggplant, mint, radish, kiwifruit, beans, broccoli, rosemary, Thai basil and Sage with all of their senses.  They also enjoyed turning the colourful vegetables and fruit into amazing creatures and people with toothpicks, sultanas and a lot of imagining what each vegetable and fruit could become.  At this time of year we have had lots of fun making reindeer and Santa.

Everyday children provoke many opportunities for learning.  Be it in the home, at school or in a creative space they constantly teach me new things.   It is the ‘rich’ interactions with children that  challenge my adult assumptions of how the world works  while fueling many intentional teachable moments.   In workshops, one of our favourite things to do is to explore and discover what a brain noodle could become.  (Please see images below if you would like to know what they are).  I often encourage children to turn out several ideas by modelling what I think the noodles could become, but it is always the children who fuel new ideas for one another and me.  Just yesterday, a child was playing with their brain noodle and noticed that it could be bent into the letters of the alphabet.  I seized this moment and turned it into a moment of intentional teaching.  We sat and wrote down the alphabet and began twisting, bending and turning the noodle into every letter we could recognise with a few moments to encourage those we had not yet mastered.  The arts has so many opportunities for intentional teaching not to mention that in a play based world children learn through play.  This model is far removed from traditional methods  for teaching literacy and is far more engaging for children and teachers.

In previous weeks, children have explored wet chalk and water colour paints as they listened to  an orchestra making various bee sounds.  The fascination for creatures from the garden continued this week as children turned steel scourers  into bee, butterfly and dragonfly creatures complete with wire legs and recycled paper bead eyes and bodies.  Children were encouraged to consider what ordinary objects could become.  When my own children saw the sample I had, they too wanted to make a creature for the garden.  I saw rich collisions to play based learning and imaginative play with the children zooming and buzzing all around with their creations and even thinking of a suitable home… the fairy garden of course!  I particularly loved it when children started to think about other recycled objects that could be turned into interesting creatures including the humble yogurt pot and bean tin.

The benefits of marble painting with children go far beyond the desire to create a painting using novel materials.  In an extended exploration children can be encouraged to manipulate the marbles by moving, rotating and tilting the tray in various ways.  They can also be encouraged to explore what happens with fast and furious movement and slow movements.  I always frame the activity as if we are taking a line for a walk through paint and across paper or board.  I also pose inquiry based questions to the children to see if they can collaboratively come up with creative solutions.  Like asking the question, ‘how would we move our bodies (arms) if we were trying to make a circle in the paint?’.    This question always ignites several others from the children, the delight in moving their bodies to make all sorts of shapes and creatures.  Marble painting can also foster opportunities to explore colour mixing in an inquiry based way.

Children delight in the sensory exploration of raw felt.  They can use their creative energy to make thick lines,  thin lines, spirals, overlap, twist and bend felt pieces into landscapes and compositions.  This exploration can be transformed into a felted canvas by gluing threads and shapes down on a board or canvas.  Other materials can be added to further embellish designs or create objects in the foreground, middle ground or background.  It is also a wonderful way to explore contrasting colours and the concept of taking ‘fluffy’ lines for a walk.