For week 3, the kids were tasked with tracing something in their surroundings, something that they noticed, something that they felt worth capturing. This group requested to do the activity indoors, which at first made me a bit nervous as we planned for this activity to be outside. However the kids took the activity in a direction I would have never imagined. While a few kids looked outside through the windows to find something to draw, many of the kids drew things around the classroom. One girl was tracing the window near the door which was made of wired glass, creating a grid pattern. I then walked by her desk near the end of the activity and saw she had made the grid multicolour, instead of drawing what she saw through the window. When I asked her why she said “because it looks nice”.

A boy in the classroom started by just tracing his favourite toy truck, and immediately told me he was done. I encouraged him to think about the colours of the truck, and about the setting a truck would be in. I asked him “what does a truck drive on?” and after a pause he said “a road” and quickly went back to drawing. By the end of the activity he had drawn an entire scene behind the truck, more than the simple road suggestion that I had given him. He had trees, and a clear blue sky behind the yellow and blue truck.

Both of these examples really showed me that these kids were making a connection between seeing and imagining. While all they saw in the room was a plain window, or a small toy truck, they created something through their art with their imagination. The kids were still noticing things, but rather than noticing the presence of something they noticed a lack of presence, and took action to recreate the world around them through art. I want to take this further and see how these drawings could empower the children as agents of change. Just as they are able to change the details of a reference, they can change the world around them. In what other ways can we demonstrate that to them?