What a week it has been for our family room children. They have begun to notice the similarities between themselves and their friends and they have also noticed some difference such as the colour of their eyes, colour of their friend’s lips and hair.
As the children noticed that we are the same but different, they wanted to capture the differences between themselves and their friends. This has then led to the children engaging with each other during painting experiences. The children stood behind the art easel and then allowed their friends to paint a portrait of them.
During this portrait painting experience, educators loved watching the children laugh at the artistic creations as they painted their friends with wonky smiles, crazy colourful hair and their impression of their friends.
Educators used this opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations with the children about what are the basics when creating portraits. The children spoke about eyes, lips and noses. The children then wanted to create a self portrait using a blank face and the playdough. With support from the educators, the children were able to create smiling faces.
From here the children wanted to learn more about facial differences so they assisted the educators to pick out some faces using the internet and then printed them off. The educator then cut the faces into pieces and laminated them to make some new jigsaw puzzles. The jigsaw puzzle kept the children learning and engaged as they explored different cultural looks and then compared these looks to themselves. The children even become creative as they placed different puzzle pieces together to create new looks.
