Noah loves to draw, but he also loves to watch TV.
Recently I’ve noticed his TV hours have been creeping up, directly correlating with how overwhelmed I’ve been feeling.
Now there is nothing wrong with a bit of TV, and I am not ashamed to admit that sometimes the downtime it affords me and my kids is pure gold, but when I stop and think about it, too much screen time doesn’t help me feel less overwhelmed, and it doesn’t improve Noah’s behaviour overall. In fact it just leads to more whining about wanting TV which drives me insane!!! Time to make a change.
The past few days Noah has not had any TV time outside of the 15-30 minutes that all the kids spend watching TV before dinner most nights of the week. Instead I have been tell him it’s ok to be bored and leaving it at that, or offering him simple suggestions and invitations to do activities I know he likes, often adding a little twist to spark his creativity and imagination.
Sometimes a seemingly small change can have interesting results, which is just what happened with this invitation to draw.
Simply changing the size and shape of the paper made it into a whole new, interesting, activity!
One day it was a loooooong thing sheet of paper on the floor. These inspired loooong drawings – roads, maps, tracks, long lines of things.
The next day it was circles of paper (I simple traced around a dinner plate and cut it out). These inspired a conversation about how circles have no corners and how the edge just goes on and on and on. There were targets and spirals and many faces.
And later small pieces of paper. Interestingly these seemed to encourage lots of little details – instead of one big monster on the page there were many little ones, and drawings with elaborate detailed stories to go with them, and he seemed much more confident to fill the whole page.
I still have triangle shaped paper to try out one day this week, and Noah has requested star shapes too!
With one simple twist of a favourite activity, I avoided a request for TV, I spent some time enjoying my boy, and since he was so keen on drawing I still got time to work on some other projects… less stress all round.
What shape paper would you or your kids like to draw on?
If you like drawing you might also like these free printable drawing prompts –
My husband brought home butcher paper from work large enough to tape down on the child-sized table we have. It covers the whole thing and my toddler LOVES to colour on it, and my husband and I join in as well since we can each sit around the table drawing on the same paper, and rotate when the kiddo wants to colour on our drawings. We get some colourful and fun looking scenes happening!
How cute are Noah’s drawings? He is quite the artist! These are great ideas. I get stuck in a rut sometimes with drawing materials. These ideas have given me some inspiration. Thanks again!
Love this idea! Might try it to extend my son’s interest in drawing (so far – pretty uninterested
!!) Thanks for the inspiration! By the way, LOVE how your site is looking;-) Anna
Let me try this and I will let you know how it goes :)
What a great idea!!!
My kids (5 & 3) and I have joined 30 pieces of A4 paper together (a project in itself!) and put it down our looong hallway and into the end room. Mr ‘I don’t like drawing’ 5 yr old is drawing a Lego story – one picture on each sheet for each ‘scene’ in the story! A new container of textas were also a big attraction. Thanks for the idea Kate which we have run and run and run with!
I love the idea. I will try different shapes paper with my 3 and 4 year old students. I thought we might try autumn leaves and snowflakes too as well as stars and triangles.