Children's Art Worksheets: “Tree with Little Fruits”
Datum
Sunglasses Blues
On this page, I would like to introduce you to a form of creative project work with children who have experienced trauma. You can find the introduction to the subject here, on the introductory page to the children’s art sheets.
In the previous chapter, you encountered some creative educational approaches and techniques through a practical example. Here, I would like to tell you about another child: an eight-year-old girl with severe trauma-related disorders.
At first, I simply couldn’t understand the girl, no matter how hard I tried. Her speech was difficult for me to make out. She repeated words and phrases, sometimes beginning to stammer on individual words. As her sentences grew longer, the stammering often took over to such an extent that she could barely get to the end. It could take a very long time. I felt uncomfortable having to ask her to repeat herself, but quite often I really hadn’t understood a thing.
By contrast, I soon discovered that she didn’t stammer when she sang. But it would have been asking too much to expect her to sing whatever she wanted to tell me, simply so that I could understand her. I only visited the centre once or twice a month, and each time I had to learn her language all over again.
In most respects, she was quiet and endearing. But if something really got her goat, she could be quite the opposite: she would shout things I couldn’t make out, and objects would go flying. She enjoyed painting. At first, painting mainly meant colouring in, but before long we managed to introduce a more demanding form of colouring: glass paints for windows. And she worked hard at it.
At first, she couldn’t see the point of the mess and scribbling I was making. She needed firm outlines to colour neatly up to. My first step was to try overlapping colours and mixing them, and it worked. Within the tight confines of a pre-drawn design with thick black outlines, she began mixing and layering colours with ever greater abandon.
The obligatory heart surrounded by dots – flowers, perhaps? I preferred not to ask – gradually gave way to sharply outlined templates: a house, a child, a flower, a tree and hearts. Those she could do. Later, the sun joined in, at first as a pear-shaped yellow blob with thin strokes for rays, but then boldly placed in the top-right corner, with really chunky rays. Everything stood neatly on the bottom edge of the page. A heart became a butterfly, and the big fat sun moved in at the top right. I tried to give her ideas. She had taken up the suggestion of turning the heart into a butterfly, which encouraged me. Perhaps give the sun a pair of sunglasses? She looked at me, scratched her head: „Give the sun sunglasses? You’re having a laugh …“ And with that, she began to stammer. I had to wait a long time for her to finish saying what I had already guessed, from her very first words, she was going to say. But then she set about colouring in her own drawing, and things really took off. I made a mental note of her moves, because all that criss-crossing wasn’t nearly as chaotic as it looked. It had a rhythm.
From the previous chapter, you already know the technique of discussing a child’s composition with them and making a design of your own alongside it. I wanted to try to get her away from the bottom edge of the page, but met with fierce resistance. So, in the end, I accepted the bottom edge myself. At least I managed to get her to agree that a tree could be bigger than the page. That just about got past her. I left the house out of it. „That would leave more room to play,“ she conceded – but only after a very long objection.
Ein Baum mit Früchtchen, RLP 2022, Projekt "Kreativpädagogik", aufbereitet als Giclée-Print bis zu einer Größe 60 cm x 84 cm - DIN A1
Her objection was roughly to the effect that the house was useful for playing in when bad weather came along. She got stuck in her stammer, couldn’t finish, and then I experienced the first fully fledged synergistic creative effect.
Without a trace of a stammer, she said: „When it rains.“
Three words, clear as a bell. „Today,“ I replied, „it isn’t going to rain.“ Just then, a whole gang of wasps descended on the paints. She started swatting at them, and I opened both large windows. The wasps flew out, heading for a plum tree laden with overripe fruit. This gave me the opportunity to move on from the butterflies and add some scribbly black insects to my design – with her consent. She told me to colour everything in now, and perhaps try mixing colours as well.
It’s always a good sign when something you yourself introduced as an idea suddenly comes back to you as the child’s own. But I remained under close supervision after the sunglasses incident, right down to the very last square millimetre of white paper.
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