Tell All or Just Think It?

This morning in co-op I was teaching my beloved kindergartners how to draw a lion. Mind you, it's a fantastic lion--that is, out of your imagination. So my encouragement to them was, "Don't worry about how real your lion looks when he's done. He's gonna be fantastic. Maybe cartoon-like or storybookish or from a wild movie. Don't worry about his legs being in proportion to his head, or his tail being too skinny or whatever."

But I did want them to follow my directions so that the entire lion would fit on the page.

Here's what happened. One boy (I'll call him Eddie) didn't exactly track with me. He was kind of jumping ahead and drawing his lion without looking up. So one of his lion's eyes was about an inch round, the other 4 inches. The face and mane were enormous, taking up nearly the entire landscape of the page. When it came time to draw the legs, they ended up teeny tiny, and he put pinhead dots for toes on the fierce creature. So cute!

The little boy sitting two seats away , who tends toward realistic renditions, said this: "Eddie's picture looks bad." Well, I promptly scolded him as kindly as I could . "Honey, that's not nice. I said these lions would be unique, and fantastic. We never say someone's art is bad."

A little girl sitting between the boys blurted out, "That's right. Even if you're thinking it's bad, you shouldn't say it."

Marie and I had to turn away and stifle our laughs. The things these kids say! The little boy with the wild 'n crazy lion has a wild 'n crazy imagination, and let me tell you, his creature was my favorite because of its distorted face, flippy whippy tail, teeny weeny toes, and puffy muffy cheeks.