Drawing with Children Lesson 1 Part 1

We found some time on Saturday to do our art lesson we weren’t able to do on Thursday. Nate was home and the other children were napping so it was the perfect opportunity for Lily and I to get thirty minutes of quiet time. I hope to journal our way through the lessons because this isn’t a “open-your-book-and-draw” type of art lesson.

Briefly, I’ll just explain that Drawing with Children uses the Monart Method for drawing. If you want to know more about this particular method, the book has an excellent explanation on the theory behind it. You could also just follow THIS link.

I am using Donna Young’s breakdown of the lessons in Drawing with Children for guidance. If you own the book, you will find it can be very overwhelming and confusing to figure out exactly how to teach each lesson. I’ve owned the book for a year, have read up to and through Lesson 1 twice during that time. I was so grateful to find Donna’s lesson plans for the book.

Our first lesson was to determine Lily’s starting level. I pretty much knew it would be Level 1, which is appropriate for five year olds. However, I allowed her to “test” through Level 2 to see how she would do. I was very surprised. Below are photos of her results. She did very well on Level 1 and almost completed Level 2. The starting level exercises are to duplicate the general structure of the image with the same components. Exact size and confidence of line are not important. Each image gets progressively harder as you can see. The top line is what she was duplicating in each of the lower lines. I made our own sheets with more space to give her an opportunity to fix it if she didn't like it.

 

Level 1 Exercise

Level 2 Exercise

After determining her starting level, we experimented with our supplies. We are using broad tipped color markers, fine tipped color markers, and a couple of very fine tipped black Sharpies. I hope to eventually buy some better supplies, but I thought starting out what we have is sufficient.
 

The purpose of this exercise was to see the different techniques the different markers can make. For example, do they blend and smear together? Do they make thick lines or thin lines? What happens when you use the side of the marker? What happens when you hold the top tip down on the paper for a few seconds?

 

We “experimented” for a little while. We had to make an agreement not to make any particular shapes but to just scribble lines. After a little while I caught Lily making hearts so we finished the exercise and she made a note for her daddy since all the supplies were already out.

I still have high hopes for the lessons in this book. And did I say how surprised I was at Lily’s duplicated drawings?