I made up a new activity to do with my 5 year old son, Bency this past weekend. Well, I should say, I think I made it up. It’s such a simple concept that it has probably been around for a hundred years and I just never heard of it.
It came about because my 7 year old daughter, Iris had a friend over and they didn’t want to include Bency in their games. Bency was feeling left out so I told him I would play with him.
First we played a very long game of chess which I finally beat him at then I suggested we do some drawing together.
Bency sighed and groaned, “Oh please don’t try to teach me how to draw Superman again.”
Since Bency is my little artist and loves to draw I had tried teaching him how to draw Superman last week. I thought he was ready to advance beyond stick people. He wasn’t. I tried to keep the lesson simple but apparently moving from stick people to Superman is too big of a leap.
So I quick came up with another idea.
I’ll call it Cloud Drawing.
This requires two or more people
One person starts out by drawing a 1-3 inch line on the paper in any direction either straight or with curves (anything goes it just has to be 1-3 inches).
The next person starts off where the last person left off (keep the lines connected) drawing their own 1-3 line or curve.
This continues until the lines finally find their way back to the starting point and you have one large shape.
Now the fun part is trying to decide what it looks like. It’s similar to cloud watching!
We turned the paper every which way and would decide what it most resembled and then I went in and added details to bring what started out as a blob to life!
This was a great activity and would make for an excellent road trip game, some rainy day fun or in our case a cold, winter day with no one to play with except your Mom!
Here are some examples of the ones we made:
Bency and I both saw a tree with a bird perched on it so I went in and added bark for the tree and an eye for the bird!
Bency saw a pirate standing by a tree…I didn’t see it at all so he went in and added the details on this one!
We saw a puppy in this one but I had to add the tail and eyes!
Motherhood Is An Art 