Coloring & Drawing

Lately, the boys have been very into coloring. My mom told me a while ago that I should encourage them to draw on blank sheets of paper, instead of just printed coloring sheets, but that has been a hard sell. They LOVE getting online at http://www.educationalcoloringpages.com/ and picking out a character to color. Caleb's favorites are all of the superheroes, while Ethan prefers Disney characters and Dora the Explorer. They ask me several times a day to print out a coloring sheet of some specific character. I love the website that makes this possible, but I sincerely hope I am not thwarting their imaginative/artistic potential by giving them such a steady diet of pre-drawn images.

I realized this weekend when Alli asked Caleb to draw animals with her that he doesn't draw anything on his own except patterns of shapes. I can't even get him to try to draw a face. When given blank paper, he always draws concentric circles, lines, or rows of some shape. It is always very regular and formulaic. He traces all of his letters very well, and can write about half of them without tracing, but he always wants each letter to be perfect. He is forever holding up a traced letter and saying, "Do you like my 'M', Mama?" I say, "It's great, Caleb! Great job!" Then he says, "I think it is not good. See that part? I'm gonna wipe it off and do it again." Sometimes I try to talk him out of it, wanting to avoid the perfectionism that he is so prone to, but other times I say nothing.

Ethan also prefers a printed sheet to a blank one. He will make a few lines across a blank sheet and be done, but he spends a long time coloring a printed sheet. First, he uses a marker to color over every letter and number on the sheet (like the web address and title at the bottom of each sheet). Then, he picks one object, like all of the flowers, and he meticulously covers each flower with whatever color marker he is using. Then he chooses another color and repeats the pattern with another object. He does not have Caleb's attention span, though, and he never finishes a picture before growing bored and getting up from the table to do something else.