Day Thirty: What has Changed?

We’ve come to the end of the 30 day doodle challenge, and if not the last doodle, the last documented and blogged about doodle for a while.  If I had this time again, I’d maybe do things a little differently.  Everything was done on the spur of the moment, and apart from the occasional purchase of some face paints or washable markers, I didn’t really plan or investigate materials.  Maybe if I do this again I’ll put a bit more prep in.  I should probably tidy my house and weed between the slabs anyway.

The journey we’ve been on has been wonderful though.  In the space of thirty days I haven’t magically turned doodling into my toddler’s favourite activity, but I’ve observed all of the following:

– spontaneous doodling more often, in more appropriate places
– improved pen control
– some instances of doodling to vent difficult feelings
– incorporating doodling into imaginative play means she’ll engage for longer
– increased confidence in her ability and fewer incidences of refusing to try
– starting to attribute meaning to her own doodles

More than that – I’ve taken time out of our really busy days to concentrate on what REALLY makes my toddler tick, and I’ve been delighted to get that extra insight into her personality.  I’m also proud of the way I’ve pushed my own creativity, trying to find ways to incorporate doodling into the least likely scenarios. 

I’d recommend the 30 day doodle challenge to anyone who has a child in their life, especially if that child doesn’t seem interested in picking up a pen.  The chances are, they just need one of their favourite people to spend a bit of time helping them realise how doodling can be interesting and relevant for them.

For our Day 30 doodle I only have one photo to share:

This is some sand in a corner of our garden.  The hopes on the left were made by my toddler poking a stick into the damp sand. 

Look what I doing!  Ah making holes inna sand.  You try it baby, no, no use dat brush, use dis walking stick.  Look, ah show you, like dat.  Now you do it.

After I executed a couple of jabs (while my two year old coach gave me lots of encouragement) I made a short line in the sand.

No, dat….Dat’s AMAZING, dat a GREAT idea Mummy!  Now my turn, look, look, AH DOING IT!

A few seconds later she had decided it was a treasure map and she was away on another adventure, but I’d seen all I needed to see.  She’d given herself the mantle of the expert, and been confident enough in her own abilities to coach someone else.  She’d taken joy in what she was doing, and seeing what else was possible.

She gets it.  She sees the point in it.  That’s all I ever wanted.

Day Twenty Nine: Creative Block

The second last day of the challenge and I found myself sitting on my kitchen floor, surrounded by dried pulses and discarded duplo thinking “I have no idea how to wangle some doodling into this situation”.  I watched my daughter fully absorbed, stuffing kidney beans and split peas up her sleeves, and my mind was blank. 

One of Starcatchers’ Associate Artists is fascinated by that moment your imagination fails you, and emphasises the importance of working through that moment rather than giving up.  By pushing through those difficult, awkward moments and coming out the other side, you build confidence that you really ARE a creative person, and you also build the kind of emotional resilience that helps you deal with other difficult situations.

I was counting on that, because I had nothing.

I started stuffing pulses into the neck of a balloon, on the vague premise that my daughter adored both, so maybe she’d enjoy the combination. It had the added bonus that every split pea that was trapped in the balloon was one fewer to stand on with bare feet later on.  My daughter spotted me, tipped out as many as she could, then asked me to blow the balloon up.

Pinterest parents and foley artists will already know what my toddler and I discovered: an inflated balloon with a few split peas in it sounds a lot like THUNDER.  This started a great vein of imaginative play as my toddler started talking about the rain and the thunder and how we had to find shelter.  We ran past the easel and I was struck by a lightning bolt of inspiration.

While our two year old shook the balloon I drew rain – whenever she stopped I stopped.  Then we swapped and she doodles her own version of the rain and thunder she could hear.

Then she ran to the sofa to hide from the storm, I found the magnetic doodler and drew some footprints.  She decided they belonged to a cat who wanted shelter, so I pretended to be a cat and “walked” along the trail.

Below the trail you can see where she doodled her own trail for the cat to follow.  This then turned into her drawing and the cat meowing and chasing the pen.

As you can see, this was quite popular:

Finally she found a red pen, I dived to find some paper so she didn’t gouge the magnetic doodler, and she drew this picture:

Dis a little girl out inna storm, she wearing her raincoat and de rain go shshshshssssssss!

As far as I know that’s the first time she’s ever given such a detailed description of what she has drawn.  If you squint at it, you can kind of see what she means.

Day Twenty Eight: Keeping it Playful

As part of my work at Starcatchers I often speak about a playful, child-led approach to the arts, and every now and then I like to double check I’m walking the walk.  So I found myself re-reading the definition of play in the Scottish Government’s Play Strategy:

Play encompasses children’s behaviour which is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated.
It is performed for no external goal or reward, and is a fundamental and integral part of healthy development – not only for individual children but also for the society in which they live.

Why would a Government have a strategy for play?  Well it turns out play is awesome for physical, social and emotional development, decision making, mental health, and for building resilience.  Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties rather than being crushed by them.  You can see why it’s an attractive trait to be encouraging in the population.

Here’s the thing.  You can’t force someone to play.  You can’t cajole them to play. You CAN suggest things, offer opportunities, provide stimulus, and use the cues young children give you to shape how activities develop. The arts in particular can be an excellent vehicle to inspire and enrich play as they provide ways for the child to express themselves.

If the right to express yourself seems frivolous to you, try and imagine how frustrating it must be to be unable to speak, unable to read or write, unable to move towards something you want, or away from something that scares you.  Imagine every single decision that affects you being made by other people, from what you wear to how long you sit in your own faeces.  Imagine having no control, then someone introduces a way for you to influence what happens, a way to be heard.  That’s what the arts can offer.

Alternatively, if the arts are not presented in a playful way, if the choice to participate (or not) is taken away, if they become more about following instructions than decision making, then they just become another obligation.  That’s something I’m determined to avoid with this challenge.

I came home to a toddler intrinsically motivated to play with the “bootiful pink castle”.  She mentioned the party invitations from yesterday but didn’t seem interested in adding to the designs.  Her energies were all concentrated into hiding two humans, one three feet tall, one five foot six, behind a small plastic castle.

Daddy will never find us here.

Eventually I was allowed “out” of the castle and, desperate to find castle based doodling opportunities, I fell back on the old reliable “draw a map of the kingdom”.  After drawing the castle and some trees I asked her what else should be on the map, but she didn’t know.  I offered a blue pen and asked if she’d like to draw some water, which she did.  Did she also want to draw some sand?  An even faster doodle and she was off.

I added some more bits and pieces myself but there was a voice in my head asking “what are either of you gaining from this?” so I let it go. 

We’ve made progress over the last 28 days incorporating doodling into different forms of play, encouraging her interest, beginning to see fine motor skills develop, the last thing I want to do is reduce it all to following instructions.  So when she saw me with the roll of big paper and declared:

Dis no time for painting Mummy, we NEED to DANCE!

I listened to her.  And instead of doodling, we danced.

Day Twenty Seven: by Royal Invitation

Over the course of this challenge, encouraging our two year old to doodle when nothing much else was happening hasn’t been too difficult.  Finding days when nothing much was happening has been the bigger challenge.  Day 27 saw a “bootiful pink castle” enter our house, a day that will go down in history as one of the most exciting events in our toddler’s young life, so the challenge was greater than usual.

(It was also the day we convinced her to throw all her dummies in the bin, but the less said about that the better.)

The prince and princess of the castle seemed mostly concerned with going through the doors again and again, though the princess did choose some orange paper.  Princes and Princesses are new to our house so I had to rack my brains for what they might want to doodle.  A youth achievement scheme?  Organic biscuits?  I settled for party invitations.

The next thing I knew, I was being told there were bad men in the castle and I had to tell them to leave because the castle belonged to the prince and princess.  Once we’d cleared out the riff raff the prince settled down to draw his party invitations.

My daughter started asking me what parts a castle has and started doodling as I explained doors, ramparts and so on.  I realised she wasn’t looking at the page, but doodling while gazing at the castle.

When windows were mentioned she seemed to make a conscious effort to change her style and draw something specific rather than doodling on autopilot -you can see the difference:

Then she was off, back playing with the precious castle, doodling forgotten.  It wasn’t the most involved she’s been, but with such stiff competition for her attention I’m impressed she doodled at all.  Little and often and all that.

Days Twenty Four thru Twenty Six

The past few days we’ve been away staying with grandparents, so doodling has been on the hoof and perhaps not as well documented as I’d have liked. 

Friday’s doodling was a return to Doodle al Fresco – the classic of “painting” with water, followed by doodling in sand.  Little signs of progression as bubbling to the surface though, like when I was doodling a smiley face and she decided to add to it. 

Ah put some ears on your bunny Mummy

she declared confidently, carefully adding a couple of lines attached to the chin.  No, I don’t see it either, but that doesn’t make her interpretation invalid.

There was some concern that we were using wet brushes in dry sand, but the wooden handles proved to be an acceptable alternative:

She also learned to purposely fill her sleeves with sand, which is just what you need when you have plans to jump into the car straight after dinner and skip the usual bath and bed routine.  We arrived at our destination rather grittier than planned.

As luck would have it, the stash of toys stored at grandparent HQ contained a mini version of the magnetic doodler she has.  Until now the mini version hasn’t been much of a hit, it’s so small even a couple of half-hearted strokes can feel like they’ve filled the space.  It’s never held her interest at all…Until now.

The board was used throughout the weekend – for absent minded doodling most often, as though she just needed to doodle somewhere, but it was also brought into her imaginative play, most of which centred around a much loved dog shaped doorstop.

Doggie can’t go anywhere, der no more paths!  Me draw a path for you Doggie, wheeeee!  Now you can go!  You go here, den here…

It seems maps and treasure maps have captured her imagination in a big way now, she’s using them as one of her standard narrative building blocks.

A neighbour had very kindly handed in some coloured pencils and gel fineliners, but both proved quite difficult to get any kind of mark from and she soon lost interest.  They can be put away until she’s a little older, but it was a good reminder that materials can make all the difference.

One final sign that the way she thinks about visual art has changed.  Once we were home, she went to draw on her whiteboard and found she’d left the lid off the pens all weekend and they’d dried up.  Cue big, fat tears:

Me no want my pens ruuuuuined!  Waaaaaaah!  Ah looove dem! 

I have promised to find some more dry wipe markers, and she has promised to keep their lids on in future. 

Day Twenty Four: You Can Lead a Toddler to Water

Remember those obsessions I was talking about?  Right now we are in the midst of an obsession with the shower.  One evening our toddler realised that when we ran the shower to wash her hair in the bath, her bath got deeper.  Now we’re at the point where she gets in a dry bath with the plug in and fills it with the shower herself.  Then cries when we have to switch it off.  This evening I’d barely said hello and she was asking to get in the shower, which was problematic because a) none of us had eaten yet and b) all my best doodling distractions involve getting dirty, so they need to happen pre-bath.

I’m the first to admit my toddler is tenacious.  Between her steely determination and her ability to thrive on less than four hours sleep, I sometimes wonder if we’re raising the next Margaret Thatcher.  Dinner was a brief affair (if it hadn’t been her Granny’s mince’n’tatties she may have refused even that) then she disappeared upstairs in a flurry of discarded socks.

I took my most precious doodling lure with me, the face paints, but she watched me drawing lines on my own arm, hopping from one foot to the other and demanding to be washed.

Ah decided me no doodle, me stay clean.

Humph.  I tried to engage her in a game of “doodle tag” but she just stood there getting more irate while I occasionally daubed her with red paint.  The toddler was not for turning.  I gave up and let her have her shower-that-make-a-bath.

In another life we may have had bath crayons to tempt her, but I’ve met too many haunted-looking parents with bath crayon induced PTSD, muttering about grout.  At any rate, I swear I could see the ghostly remains of some foot and ankle doodles, so I suspect she was doodling today, just not with me. 

Day Twenty Three: Rotation, Rotation, Rotation

One of the best things about having young children in your life is seeing what they obsess over, and watching how it changes over time.  Some obsessions are thankfully fleeting (like the month my daughter spent waking up at 3am to do an hour of chin ups on the side of her cot) and some are more enduring.  Along with sand and dried pulses, wiping stuff has a special place in her little two year old heart.

All it took to get her to her easel was an enthusiastic suggestion from me and the promise of some wipes.  In the old days, pre-doodle challenge, most often our toddler would do the wiping and whichever adult she had roped in would draw the pictures to be repeatedly wiped away.  This time, she made a beeline for the pen.

After a quick doodle inside the easel (of course) she started rapidly drawing loads of swirly circles then wiping them off just as quickly.

She repeated the same actions again, all her doodles involved going round and round, which made me think she was working on a rotation schema – known in laymen’s terms as the “wax on wax off” scene from Karate Kid.

Eventually, dozens of doodles later, she started to slow down and I could see her attention starting to waver.  In a fit of madness, I suggested she might like to draw Uncle A (she did this once unprompted, an excellent tadpole figure that she has never repeated) but her reply made me so proud I was fit to burst:

No sank oo Mummy, ah keep doing ma ‘quiggles.

That’s right sweetheart, ignore your mother’s silly demands for product based visual art – your squiggles are just as valid, and I’m glad you know that.

Day Twenty Two: Pebble Painting

On the radio during my drive home the DJ was discussing pebble painting with a guest.  I’m fairly sure I did this craft at some point in my childhood, and I’m certain Pinterest is full of beautiful, step by step examples of different designs, techniques, ways to display pebbles post-painting.  I very deliberately avoided looking up any of those.  I was driving home to a two year old who adores pebbles and has a very slight interest in painting – what were the chances I could combine the two?

I quickly grabbed some pebbles from the garden, dried them and, on a whim, chucked them in a couple of disposable foil containers.  Paints and brushes were assembled, and straight after dinner I declared briskly “right, I just need to paint these pebbles….”

ME HELP YOU!  Me want a do dat!

In my fake nonchalance I forgot to protect her clothes or the table.  The pebble painting definitely captured her interest and I think framing them in the tubs helped, but she still wanted to paint the table.  Of course she did: she’s two years old

Aaah, that’s better.  We sat together painting pebbles and bits of Sunday supplement together, and when she asked for the wipes it was to attempt to clean the newspaper rather than her own hands.

This led on to a thorough exploration of the materials: stuffing the wipe into the pot of paint (which was looking a bit dodgy anyway, so no great loss), stacking the pebbles, wiping, stamping – and all without panicking about the paint getting on her hands!

It’s great when you get to see real progress, and that’s what we had today.

Day Twenty One: Jigsaws and the Imperfect

Confession time: I LOVE stationery.  I cherish it.  Felt tip pens should be in the packet organised by the colour spectrum, their caps should always be replaced, their points never squashed by heavy handed scribbling.  A fresh stick of chalk, unused and straight from the box is a thing of beauty.  Pencils should be carefully sharpened and never, ever dropped in case the lead inside breaks.

None of these feelings are terribly helpful when it comes to encouraging toddlers explore materials and letting go of trying to control what’s happening.  A lot of parents I know loathe “crafts” because they find it all so stressful, they just want to take the sunflower plate/ loo roll butterfly / sock puppet out of their toddlers’ hands and make it “properly”.  Teeth are ground whenever dimpled hands take crayons outside the colouring in lines.  Eyes twitch when stickers are folded over and crumpled instead of stuck in the appropriate places.

One obvious way to avoid a lot of that stress is to deliberately ignore any kind of art activity that has strict parameters or a defined, ideal outcome.  Happily, that usually means avoiding activities that are prescribed rather than child-led, so as well as giving your stress levels a break you’ll be building your child’s confidence levels, emotional resilience, decision making and contributing to healthy cognitive development.  As for the fear of them wrecking the materials, it helps me a bit to remind myself that they belong to my daughter, not me.  If she wants to fold every single one of her stickers in half then she has every right to do so.

“Fake it til you Make it” also applies here – the more you pretend it’s OK for your toddler to experiment with the materials, the more OK you will eventually be with it.  Give her materials you are comfortable saying goodbye to if neccessary, and only intervene if someone or something precious is in the firing line.  I’ve had to practice what I preach here and I’m still far from perfect, but it’s definitely helping.

On to the day’s doodling.  I came home to an excited toddler who took me by the hand and proudly showed me the 24 piece dinosaur jigsaw she’d made with her grandfather.  I suddenly had a flashback to an impulse purchase.

A while ago I bought a “draw your own jigsaw” for my toddler, and almost instantly regretted it.  I couldn’t let go of how precious it was and I knew she would likely perform a half-hearted scribble then abandon it completely.  I’d have drawn a picture for her, but at that point she wasn’t really into jigsaws either (just tipping the bits onto the floor then throwing them around).  All in all, it wasn’t a great purchase at the time.

But now it was time for me to give it up and hand it over.  I made her close her eyes and I did a big dramatic reveal, and her face was a picture.  No hesitation, as soon as she knew she was allowed to draw on it she was doodling away with a speed and intensity I rarely see in her mark making.

There was still a little bit of a control freak in me though – I needed all the pieces to have a bit of colour on them so the jigsaw would be buildable.  Our two year old has a bit of an obsession with alternately pretending to be a baby or making adults pretend that they’re babies, so I went out on a limb, did a lot of GooGoo GaGa pointing at the bare bits with a second colour, pretending I wasn’t able, and she was happy to take on the mantle of expert and fill in the blanks.

We had a great time, and then she thoroughly enjoyed tipping all the pieces onto the couch.

Days Nineteen and Twenty: Schemas

Child development experts often look at play in terms of schemas, patterns of repeatable behaviour that young children use to learn about the world.  If you’ve ever wanted to scream why does she always drop food on the floor/ tip the crayons out of the box/ line up cars/ climb anything and everything, the chances is your toddler is working through a schema. 

My daughter, like all toddlers, has some very specific patterns of play of her own; most of her imaginative play involves babies or pets being lost and found, whenever she finds a window or hole to peek through she pretends to serve us coffee, and she is passionately obsessed with dried pulses of all kind.  I had hoped that this 30 day doodle challenge would encourage her to develop more specific patterns of play, and it has.

She used to want to draw on herself all the time.  Now she wants to draw on me.

On Saturday (day 19) we had a birthday party that afternoon, which meant the morning was peppered with one question:

It time to go to Matty’s pahty?

(repeat ad nauseum)

She was playing with reusable dinosaur stickers and I thought it would be fun to draw them a habitat.  I deliberately kept the drawing quite scribbly and abstract to encourage her to scribble with me (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it) but despite lots of chat while I was drawing she never put pen to paper.

She did enjoy sticking the stickers on, but that’s not doodling.

My daughter wanted to play a favourite: Mummy Fox can’t find Baby Fox.  I tried some more doodling while I took on the role of Mummy Fox, but apart from one half-hearted swipe she couldn’t be tempted.

That’s right, those are the paws of a toy fox near the bottom of that photo.

Fast forward to after the party, and we had one more chance to doodle. My toddler decided I was a better canvas than the page, but in her post-party excitement she was nowhere near as gentle with the washable pens than she had been with the face paints.  A few frantic gouges and our doodling was over for the day.

Sunday didn’t seem to be shaping up to be any better doodlewise.  I thought I’d dig out some coloured paper, which was met with a classic display of the enclosure and trajectory schemas: she tipped out the pencils and started scrunching up the paper and throwing it everywhere.

She then wrapped the pencils in the paper (just like she’d “helped” me wrap the birthday presents the day before)

I’m pretty sure I didn’t launch the finished article across the room though -that was her own touch.

In an eye-twitching fit of desperation I saw her stick the pencils between her toes and thought “DRAWING WITH OUR FEET! Maybe that’s the answer!

It wasn’t.  But at least she had stopped throwing things.

And then, our toddler asked/demanded

I want the things Mummy.  The things you got, I want them!

Can I has the, the other things?  PLEASE.

We’ve been hearing “I want” a lot over the past few weeks, usually in relation to pink castles or explorer kits.  But this was her asking for the face paints – that’s right, a direct request for art supplies!  She has NEVER asked to get the pens or crayons or pencils out, and even when she’s asked to paint 70% of the time it’s been a ruse – she spends ten seconds painting and half an hour washing the brushes.

This was different.  This was our two year old actually wanting to doodle.

Forget her canvas of choice for a moment, look at the way she’s holding that applicator.  To see a two year old who had been launching pencils around the room a few minutes earlier suddenly show such precision and concentration was gobsmacking.

Imagine all those little children, usually boys, who run past the stack of A4 paper and are only interested in tipping crayons onto the floor.  I firmly, wholeheartedly believe they are every bit as creative, and artistic, and can be just as engaged with mark making as the children who happily sit down at the art table and doodle away.  They just need to find the artistic medium that works for them.