Sometimes when the 6-year-old and I get mad at each other we just pass notes back and forth under his bedroom door.
Listening to your materials
Jon Klassen (author of the fantastic Hat trilogy) shares this quote with people who ask him how to get kids writing and drawing more.
He explained in a tweet thread:
i take “the dictation of the materials” to mean that there are things that certain forms or tools “like” to do more than other things. certain kinds of mediums make for certain kinds of drawings, a picture book format makes for certain kinds of stories (loosely speaking).
being able to analyze what the materials WANT to do is such a huge part making anything & seems like rather than getting kids to specifically write something or draw something, getting them to think about that is way more broadly useful.
because you end up applying it yourself. you are a material with strengths and weaknesses. being able to look at what you’re working with objectively and decide what to make based on that is such a huge part of this job, at least it has been for me.
(relating to getting kids writing/drawing, materials give parameters. like giving them only a black marker means they might start thinking about drawings that only need that – what picture does that marker WANT to make? now they are solving a problem instead of “draw something!”)
(where that applies to writing, for me, was the absence of narration. i don’t know what to do with it, so i’m left with dialogue. what do stories with visuals and only dialogue WANT to do? they want to be about lying a lot, apparently.)
I’ve written a lot more about Albers and her idea of materials dictating the work in my previous post, “Materials, man.” (For more on materials and kids making stuff, check out “On Chuck Jones, Parenting, and Art Supplies.”)
Always drawing
The six-year-old is taking art classes at Laguna Gloria. I love dropping him off because while he’s in class, the 3-year-old and I get to explore the grounds. (An older dad told me years ago how important it is to split your kids up once in a while and go on little one-on-one “dates” together.) Yesterday the 3-year-old was having some serious separation anxiety (my wife is out of town), so I put some paper down on the stone ledge around the tiny koi pond and told him to draw the plants. This is what he drew.
Day of the Dead
When you have kids you always find all this weird half-finished stuff lying around the house. (Half-finished drawings, half-finished bananas, etc.) I found this comic on the kitchen table, drawn by Owen at age 5. (“Julese” is his 3-year-old brother, Jules.) Drawn in a comic book notebook by The Unemployed Philsopher’s Guild.
Harry and his monster hat
“One cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by new records of shame…. the house and land we occupy, have lost their best value, and a man looks gloomily at his children, and thinks, ‘What have I done that you should begin life in dishonor?’”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1851
A devastating image by photographer Brook Mitchell in the NYTimes. Nails the stakes of climate change: It is our children who will have to sift through the wreckage.
I was particularly affected by the photo, as I have a towheaded almost-six-year-old who looks a lot like Harry. (“Where have you been my blue-eyed son?” Dylan sings in “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” a song that now destroys me.)
A little googling led me to the original Guardian piece about Australian farm families battling the draught. You can see more photos of Harry and his family there, including this one, of him wearing what he calls his “monster hat”:
That one brings the slightest smile: Children are resilient, and no matter how bad it gets, there will still be moments of humor. Even if it’s gallows humor.
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