It’s All About the Mind, Folks!
This summer I began working with a small private lesson group of 5-year-old little ladies. In our first lesson together, I asked them not to use an eraser. This is a pretty challenging request for most 5-year-olds, believe it or not! At this age, kids are still developing small motor skills. Their little hands don't always direct the pencil where their minds want the pencil to go! But I encouraged them to use those "mistakes" to their advantage. Sometimes in drawing, you have to make the wrong line, see that it is wrong, and then change it, in order to get it right. The girls struggled with accepting their wrong lines but adapted to it pretty easily by the end of the first lesson. Arriving at my second week of lessons, at the top of the hour Phoebe W. gifted me with a special drawing, that you can see here. When a 5-year-old is full of such clarity of spirit, I feel more hopeful about our collective futures. After all, "It's all about the mind", people!