Why it’s hard to teach children drawing lessons – elementary grades
I meet many art teachers and elementary teachers in my art training workshops that share similar frustrating stories about how their students struggle with the ideas of learning reaslim. There’s modern new ways you can approach teaching children drawing lessons. So in this blog I want to share some reasons why this happens, and provide you resources that will alleviate some of these frustrations.
Why Kids Can’t See The Artist Way
Teaching young children the abstract analysis of the structure of form is complicated for many reasons. First, observations on forms, shapes, patterns, scale, light and colors in nature is an abstract concept to the young developing mind. In adult fine art schools these abstract ideas are learned by classifying these ideas into a series of relationships. To learn how to draw the artist must learn concepts like form, shape, and mass to understand nature’s perspective.
My naturalistic studio observations over the past twenty years has revealed that children and adult cognitive processing (what we know and remember), visual perception (what our brain sees), and fine-motor abilities (how we use materials) are connected and responsible for how we learn artist skill sets. So without children being mature in all three areas, children will struggle regardless of how many times you demonstrate how to draw in front of them. Once all three areas are mature realistic imagery can be learned and mastered with practice. Developing the observation of an artist eye comes over time steadily, especially for young children.
Why teachers are frustrated with drawing lessons
I’ve come to learn that these challenges come from having students working on advance copy-mode style lessons focused on the elements and principles of design intended for a more mature art student. Combined with students observing master fine artist media to perceive abstract conceptual ideas in their artworks. These ideas are taught from many different fine art schools of thought, and conflicting points of view on teaching children. Also, typical visual arts education today tries to wrap difficult artistic concepts into fewer art lessons without considering the 3 part sensory system responsible for understanding abstract language of art.
The other reason elementary teachers are running into these roadblocks is public school art standards, and the common core are recommending consolidated art lessons without proper guides or resources for teaching young artist. This method is inappropriate for developing children to learn by. These standards originally came from studying adult fine art studio processes at college and adult level. Lower elementary children are not ready to learn these complicated ideas, and upper elementary children are just coming of age to observe with an artist eye.
A Modern up-to-date way to teach children drawing lessons
Young children must be mature in three areas to start learning the meaning of abstraction. I’ve successfully taught thousands of children how to draw and paint realistic imagery with lessons that support these sensitive cognitive growth phases. I’ve also learned how to separate abstract concepts into smaller lesson parts for better engagement. This modern science art method aligns with a child’s growth. If you would like to learn more about my science art teaching method, you can read my blogs, purchase my books and curriculum, or join my Newsletter on how to teach kids visual arts.
Love to hear your feedback on this topic!
Warmly,
Spramani
A checklist of lesson ideas children must work on to become better at drawing…its free!
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