Today we are absolutely delighted to have a guest post from illustrator and author Shoo Rayner. Not only has Shoo written and illustrated over 175 books of his own (gasp!), he has also illustrated over 70 books for other authors, amongst them Michael Morpurgo and Michael Rosen!
Shoo is the first of a series of illustrators who will be joining us on the 31st of the months that have the extra day.
Look, read, and enjoy!
Children love drawing. Give them paper and pencil, suggest something for them to draw - maybe show them how to draw it - and they are away.
While they draw, they are improving their hand/eye co-ordination skills, learning about the thing they are drawing and building up a story.
When I show a class of children how to draw, there are a couple of minutes' silence, when I’ve finished, as they catch up and put the finishing touches to their masterpiece.
I love this moment. I wait for the hand to go up.
“Please Miss, can I draw a city in the back ground?”
“Of course you may,” I say, and gently remind them I’m a mister not a miss!
“And can I draw an aeroplane in the sky?” asks another child.
“You can draw anything you like.” I smile, sweetly and innocently and nonchalantly add, “You could build up a whole story if you like.”
The blue touch paper has been lit. Stand back and watch what happens.
Their original drawings are soon surrounded with incidental detail, patterns, backgrounds, enemies, explosions, love-hearts jelly fish - you name it.
Each child is building up a story.
“You can put some words in there if you like,” I tell them, adding a speech bubble or a caption to my drawing.
By the end of the lesson a class full of first drafts have been completed. The children who would normally be staring out of the window when asked to write, have their story organised and ready to go.
For many, myself included, the pictures aren’t a pretty thing that is added on at the end if there is time, the pictures are what it is all about. Its the words that are the embellishment. Words are decoding clues for the thick kids who can’t draw!
We are not all wired up the same way. The children who do words well, grow up to be the teachers, because the visual kids are excluded. Each new generation of education experts becomes more word biased than the one before and further removed from the visual.
Once there were art teachers and art rooms. The art room was a refuge for the visually and practically-minded. Now art seems to have become an academic subject to be written about. Sadly, examiners can only tick facts and not make subjective decisions.
Years ago, before photocopiers were invented, children used hard, shiny toilet paper to trace maps and pictures into their exercise books. The line was traced, then reinforced on the back with pencil, then traced again onto the paper and then redrawn over the faint image that had been transferred.
The image was drawn at least four times. As we know, repetition is the essence of learning. If you trace or draw the plans, maps and illustrations in your exercise book, you remember.
If you draw freehand, you are so intensely involved in the process that, again, the message is deeply impressed, especially if the picture has to be planned and re-drawn to get it right.
Colouring in a worksheet is just filling in time - mere crowd control.
If you are wondering why half the children in a class don’t write and don’t retain information, maybe they are visually minded. Or maybe they see the world in numbers or in dance movements instead of words. Maybe their Fridays are lovely shade of orange - maybe they think literacy tastes of lemons.
We are all wired up differently.
Throw away the photocopier. Burn the worksheet. Let children illustrate their own work. The message and the lesson will be ingrained deeply in their subconscious.
Maybe, once in a while, start a literacy lesson with drawing - if there is time left at the end of the lesson, then... let them write the story as a treat!
6 comments:
Wonderful! Yesterday, my daughter was doing a module of her marine biology course. She spent most of the time drawing the most amazing food chain, worthy of a professional biogical illustrator (she's 18). My other daughter organised all her revision notes as vast, A1 posters crammed with pictures. (It did her no harm, she got a first from Oxford.) Visual learning is massively undervalued, partly (I suspect) because it takes longer.
"Each new generation of education experts becomes more word biased than the one before and further removed from the visual." That seems to be sadly true, but at the same time the non-fiction books they use become increasingly visual. The problem is that the illustrations are no longer commissioned from subject experts, they are chosen by non-experts from the cheapest stock photo libraries so much of the potential for those illustrations is squandered.
Thanks for this post, Shoo. It did make me long for the distinctive smell of paints and the old-style art room. Bliss! Loved the way you create a story with the children.
I'm also with you on the constant "colouring-in" worksheets. They offer standardised and/or Disney-style images that leave no space for child's imagination, and children are given them everywhere, from pizza restaurant mats through to children's libraries & author "character" events. A child must, now, be very confident about drawing their own version of, for example, the Little Mermaid after the intense Ariel bombardment.
However, writers can be visual too. If you can't see the moment or scene unfolding in your head, it's very hard to write it.
Stroppy, liked the sound of those A1 revision posters!
Great post. I get so frustrated at the obsession with conformist learning that only rewards one type of intelligence. Right now I'm doing a year-long BTEC in art and design. The amount of writing required far outweighs the art and everything is plagued with what I call 'eduspeak'. I do the required writing because I'm used to writing, but my daughter only got a D in her Art GCSE because she wouldn't conform and was only interested in the art. It's so frustrating and the educational change in tide is long overdue.
Really interesting post, Shoo - great to have an illustrator's perspective. I always regret that more adult fiction doesn't have illustrations - surely, if it added so much to Dickens...
Thank you for this post. Reading it, I felt comforted at your understanding of the visual learning importance.
I was that child who was told I wouldn't get better marks just because I drew the diagrams, maps etc. well in subjects other than art...
I loved the art room, but hated the powder paints with limp brushes and the sugar paper or newsprint we were given to paint on. There were no quality materials available to us.
Can you imagine my amazement when I discovered I could buy good brushes, different grades of pencils, watercolour paper... the list goes on.
When I look at the mass off cheap, fun art materials available for children today I want to buy them up and give them away to all visually minded children, and tell them to explore their world with them.
Lack of art in schools is a missed opportunity in learning. There are so many ways to connect information with a child's mind.
A great post Shoo!
I was fortunate enough to be one of those 'old school' art teachers with a HUGE art room drenched with the smell of paint and paper and pots firing in a kiln. I hardly wanted to go home at the end of the day, I loved my job so much.
Your mention of those old methods of drawing maps, reminded me that I can still draw the continents of Africa and South America with every curve, nook and cranny and still remember my free hand botany drawings of phloems and xylems.
Up until your post I hadn't realised how visual my learning was. But now I'm smiling at the thought of those hours with ink and pen in hand. How can one not enjoy Geography and Botany learning it this way!
Really spot on post!
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