During the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" period, our park applied for the topic "Practical research on children's developmental evaluation with theme art activities as the carrier" of Beijing Preschool Education Research Association. As an experimental class, our class started with "self-portrait" and carried out "unique me" theme art activities. In the past two months, the children have experienced a qualitative change from appreciation to feeling, from rough painting to fine cutting, from completing activities to falling in love with selfies.
Children's feelings and understanding of things are different from those of adults, and their unique brushstrokes, actions and language often contain rich imagination and emotion. In the process of recording and analyzing children's creative process and self-portrait, we can see the unique individual more clearly and feel the rich and beautiful inner world of children behind the "self-portrait" more deeply.
"Self-portrait" works reflect the natural tendency of "beauty" in children's hearts.
"Self-portrait" seems simple, but it is not easy to show it on drawing paper. It needs children to observe and understand themselves. At the beginning of the activity, we took feeling and appreciating the self-portrait works of celebrities as the primary goal, and helped children understand and accumulate the experience of "self-portrait" through many appreciation activities. After each appreciation, children will be asked to draw "self-portraits". I was deeply impressed by the state and works of the children when they first painted "self-portraits". Let me realize that every child has a "beautiful" seed in his heart.
Most of the girls' works beautify themselves to some extent: they wear crowns on their heads, princess skirts, and some even add earrings, and their faces are painted red ... Most of the boys draw images with their mouths up, smiling, upright and single color ... For the teacher's question "Is this yourself?" The general answer of girls is "I feel so beautiful, I like myself like this." Boys usually say, "I am like this, and so am I in the mirror."
In these works, we can see that girls prefer to highlight their own beauty, while boys prefer to emphasize their friendliness and modesty. Although boys and girls have different emphases and prominent contents, what they have in common is children's pursuit of beauty, and children all want to be beautiful, happy and friendly. The positive implication of activities on children's self-evaluation and the cultivation of children's aesthetic taste have laid a good foundation for us to achieve the goal of "harmony between beauty and goodness" in art education.
"Self-portrait" works reflect the uniqueness of children's works.
We not only let children feel and appreciate artists' works, but also guide children to further observe facial features under different expressions, understand the relationship between facial features and emotional expression, and provide rich materials for children to try to create self-portraits with different materials. This process makes me see the uniqueness of children's expression-every child's work is related to their thinking, life experience and emotion, and it is a unique work formed by children with their own way of thinking, value orientation and aesthetic experience.
1. Children's unique "self" expression in the same material
In order to let children understand the relationship between emotions and facial features, we ask children to observe and experience different expressions, and also let children experience the position of facial features under different emotions by putting a teaching aid "patchwork face". With these foundations, children began to try to make self-portraits with ultra-light clay.
When Lele created, he first rubbed the clay into thin strips, then formed an ellipse close to his face, and said, "My face is a pointed chin, and I think it is very similar to my face." Then he took out some black ultra-light clay, divided it into several groups and kneaded it into thin strips in turn. I asked him if he had hair, and he nodded. He made some hair and stuck it on it, and then made ears out of the remaining black clay. Finally, he began to look at his expression in the mirror and said to me, "Miss Li, I like my serious look because I think it's cool." While looking in the mirror, he pinched the mud, and carefully finished the work "Serious Me": the pull-down corners of the mouth, frowning brows, small focused eyes and erect hair vividly expressed his serious expression.
The smiling self-portrait not only shows the beautiful dimples when he smiles, but also reflects the details of the patterns on the clothes he wore that day, which is exactly the children's meticulous observation of themselves. When Douding was creating, I kept watching and recording. He chose white clay that children generally don't want to use, and then stuck it on the upper and lower sides of the red mouth. I asked curiously, "What does the white on my mouth mean?" The bean put it in my ear and whispered, "I tell you, this is what I saw in the mirror when I brushed my teeth." The white one is toothpaste foam. " It turns out that the one they called Dou Ding showed her life experience when she brushed her teeth! The white toothpaste foam around his mouth, nose and body makes his works particularly eye-catching.
Children's unique thinking, careful observation and strong interest in different emotional States enable each child to grasp the key features in the creative process. Finally, every selfie is so vivid and full of childlike interest.
2. In the process of using different materials, the expression of "self" is still unique.
In the creation of self-portraits using a single material, the teacher found that children have their own ideas and can express delicate emotions in their works. In order to further develop children's imagination and creativity, we try to provide more materials for children to choose and use.
This time, children's works let us see the "one hundred languages" in selfie creation. Children will not only choose materials according to their face and facial features, but also pay attention to the similarity between the color and texture of each material and the facial features to be expressed. At the same time, we can also feel the deepening of children's self-awareness in the works.
Duoduo decisively chose a kraft paper board among many materials. He said to himself, "I'm black, so I'll use this one." He cut his hair with black and purple paper, and then said to himself in the mirror, "Oh, my eyebrows are quite black, too." Then I painted my eyebrows black with a black pen. There are different facial features in the optional materials prepared by the teacher. I searched many of these five senses and soon found a pair of small eyes. He looked at me with satisfaction and smiled a little shyly and said, "I just have a little small eyes." I smiled and said, "That's pretty handsome, too." Duoduo smiled and opened his mouth wide, so I said, "Duoduo, look how happy you are laughing, and your mouth is bent." After listening to my words, I chose a piece of red soil to make myself a big mouth.
Andy chose an oval paper tray, thought for a moment and said to me, "Miss Li, I want to turn the paper tray into a flesh color, just like my skin color." Then he took out a mass of clay close to flesh color and covered the whole paper. Then I chose some blue-black clay and began to rub it into thin strips. After rubbing the thin strips, I found that he didn't stick them on his head, but black and blue strips were mixed together. I asked curiously, "Andy, why did you do this to your hair?" Andy smiled and said, "My hair is a little curly, similar to my father's, so it looks curly." After listening to Andy's explanation, I was both moved and surprised. These little guys left a deep impression on me again and again. It turns out that their little brains have such unique ideas and self-understanding.
"Self-portrait" works reflect the relative "stability" of children's creative style.
In the process of theme activities, I found that some children's creative styles are relatively stable, and they have not changed much in their work styles because of the rich materials, and they are not easily influenced by their peers and show imitation behavior.
For example, the following three self-portraits were all painted by Tian Tian. He studied painting outside and has a relatively skilled and stable painting foundation. In several self-portraits, the characters are basically the same, and the painting style is relatively unified. This is the embodiment of her creative mode. Teachers can try to guide her to break through the inertia thinking, such as trying different hairstyles or expressions.
For another example, the children of Douding were particularly reluctant to draw by themselves at first, and always thought that they were not good at drawing. Every time I draw, I hold hands while drawing, for fear of others' comments and comments. His consistent expression can also be seen in many painting attempts: round head, body represented by lines, and others replaced by small circles and dots. As can be seen from the works of Dou Ding, he is in the symbolic period of his painting ability. This kind of self-portrait embodies the uniqueness and limitation of children's early graphic thinking, which needs our guidance from enriching children's life experience and improving children's observation and representation ability.
Self-portrait works reflect the development of children's self-knowledge.
In the process of creating children's self-portraits many times, I saw the changes of children at close range: some children resisted painting themselves and were able to show their self-portraits; Some children never accept their appearance to appreciate and like themselves; Some children never know how to introduce their works in a concrete, complete and smooth way ... These little advances have benefited from our many in-depth appreciation, observation and creative activities.
In this process, children not only improved their creative ability, but also made progress in self-cognition and self-evaluation, which is also an important goal of our "selfie" theme activity.
Xin Wei is the younger boy in his class. In the early stage of the self-portrait theme activity, he would cry every time he painted himself, and he would be unhappy when he looked in the mirror. I didn't know until I asked the reason carefully. Because his nostrils were outside, he felt that his nose was very similar to that of a pig, and he was particularly dissatisfied with his nose, so he was particularly depressed and sad. So, I guided him through observation and found that everyone's five senses are different and everyone has their own characteristics. Gradually, he began to accept his appearance and no longer felt that his nose was ugly.
We can see the characteristics of Xin Wei's nose from his works. The first two times he deliberately drew according to his own appearance. Later, whether painting or other creations, he was able to express his nose in different ways. We found that Xin Wei didn't hate her nose so much. She would take the initiative to tell the children about the characteristics of her nose.
After two months of trying and persistence, children's painting skills, language expression, imagination and creativity, as well as self-cognition and self-evaluation have been improved to varying degrees. This also makes us believe more and more that every child is unique. Thanks to the children for bringing us such wonderful enjoyment, we are willing to continue to be spectators and enter your inner world.