Drawing with Class 2

Yesterday in the second grade class, I asked students to do something fun and creative. I know it was fun because they were quiet while they were working. If class 2 is quiet they are either very engaged or very asleep. And don't dare distract once engaged; they may become hostile.

I told everyone to get a single piece of paper and to draw anything they wanted (although, I made the mistake of explaining the game using my own example, a simple house, and we ended up with seven houses on the first turn.) I told them they had one minute to draw their pictures. After one minute, they had to move to the next picture and add to the previous drawer's drawing. Erasers were confiscated and scribbling was punishable by missing a round. But no one missed a round. Prone heads, dancing pencils, power stances:

This game gets harder as you go, because you seem to run out of things to draw. But that's the lesson--you can never run out of things to draw. Art does not have a finish line. It does have a lot of houses and dragons and suns with faces.

And a gun in the bottom there? That might be me after
taking a picture of a second grader, mid-drawing

Some days are more fun than others, and I think today counted as a fun day. It's good to get students up and moving and drawing from images in their brains, not copying images from books (which I've seen too much of.) Tomorrow I will try to document the first graders in class, but they can be elusive creatures to learning, resistant to most forms of lessons and English.

And they're disarmingly adorable