Drawing in Tandem

Materials:

Art supplies

Directions:

Are you on the same artistic wavelength as your child? Find out with this activity.

Supply yourself and your child with pieces of paper, as well as crayons, markers, or colored pencils. Find a place where the two of you can draw without seeing each other's paper, then take turns calling out shapes to be drawn. When you're finished, compare pictures, and see how alike or dissimilar they may be.

A variation on the activity entails combining shapes, objects, and colors. For instance, the following sequence of drawing tasks—"square," "green," "tree," "car," "circle," and "yellow"—might lead one person to draw a picture of a house with a green front lawn, a tree in front, a car parked in front of the house, and a yellow sun in the sky. The other person might have drawn a statue of a car on a pedestal next to a large green tree with a round brass plaque on the base.

Want to get real tricky? Toss in some abstract things to illustrate, such as "love," "happiness," and "fear." You might be surprised at the window this opens into your child's mind (and your own).

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