Collaborative Art!

The act of creating something as a community is an important experience for a person of any age, and our little children gain tremendously from it. The children at The Little School of both Duke and Hillsborough have been participating in experiences of this kind, and we are seeing wonderful things come from them!

This mixed media art was created by 2, 3, 4, and 5 year-old children at the little school at Hillsborough. Over the course of a few weeks, children came in in small groups to contribute to the collage. The last thing that we did to this collage was unifying it with some paint. We worked with only one color for a couple of reasons. We discussed how adding one color of paint to the collage helped unify it and what that meant.

Children are more likely to explore different ways to apply paint when the color palette is limited. Here, Micah has just figured out that she can drizzle the paint by shaking he brush. 

"Look I'm making dots, I am smashing my paint brush." -Eva

"What will it look like if I paint on this? (looking at the cork)" -Cole

At Duke, the Otters have begun a collaborative sculpture. We started with sticks, tape, and wire. Future plans include ribbon, paint, and more wire!

 A. made up a story about the sculpture: "Guys, lets pretend that the tree is broken and that we are giving it bandages and fixing it."K decided to attach sticks together and then wrapped gold and silver wire around the sticks.  E was very excited to help his friends with tape. He put himself in charge of cutting pieces of tape and delegated where it should go. 

Children gain so much from creating together. It is a developmentally appropriate way to introduce and encourage sharing. Also, problems that need solving always naturally occur, whether it is a social problem or a construction issue. At one point, A and E worked out an issue that arose when they wanted to use the same roll of tape. Together, K and I figured out how to make two sticks stay together that kept falling apart. From these experiences and many others, these children are developing social and critical thinking skills, learning how to use visual, descriptive language  (describing what we see and what we are creating), tuning fine and gross motor coordination, and exercising creative thinking, to name just a few of the benefits!

Love,
Miss Morgan

Happy Halloween!

Halloween has come and gone, and The Little School is still humming with the fun, fall festivals, families and countless parades. We had mermaids and fish, princesses and Wild Things. Lions and tiger and bears, and of course, more Elsa's then you can shake a icicle at! We loved seeing all of our families brave the parking lot and join us for the celebrations. Thank you for sharing in the fun.