Week of September 9 - Emily's In The Mood For Drawing

I know I have shared in earlier posts about how much Emily likes to draw on her little pen tablets that have the particles behind the drawing surface and a magnetic pen. She just loves to draw, and slide the eraser lever and draw some more.

But there are times when Emily expresses a very firm interest in doing some old fashioned drawing with real paper and real pencil. Note: Emily does not like crayons, Emily likes pencils. So we pretty much let her work with pencils when she wants to draw.

So this weeks Emily Sarah feature is about Emily drawing with "old school" pencil and paper. :)

So first, let me share a handful of photos here with you, and then I'll share some comments to go along with the photos at the bottom of the post here.






First, note how Emily has established proper form and style for holding a pencil. She actually learned this by copying Nancy and I simply by watching one of us using a pen or a pencil. She's a quick study, as she has been doing this for months now. Oh, and she does not want any little stubby "cut-off" pencils, she wants the real deal adult pencil with eraser. She has been known to flip the pencil around and use the eraser sometimes too.

Second, Emily prefers to draw on paper with pencil as I noted earlier, and with regard to the paper, old Calendar pages from our wall calendar seem to be her current favorite. We have determined there a couple of reasons for his. One is that she like to have something besides a blank sheet of paper. It seems to inspire her and keep her going for a long time (she was drawing for the better part of an hour in the session when these photos were taken. Another is that she really likes it if the page has actual Chinese characters on it. Emily recognizes Chinese writing or text when she see it now (she will point to it and say "chineeese!"). And if you click on the last of the photos to see if full size, you can see that Emily has scribbled over many of the small Chinese Text on the calendar page. What she is actually doing is pretending that she is writing Chinese text herself. It's adorable to watch her do this as she will go systematically down or across the sheet and pretend she is writing, and will then point to it and say "dadda, Chineeese!"

The other comment to share is that Emily will continue to draw and draw and draw. When she gets tired of "writing" Chinese, she will flip a sheet over and start to doodle. Sometimes she is doodling little swirls, sometimes she is doodling long lines or a series of back and forth lines, and just about every combination thereof.

And of course the best thing of all here is that Emily loves to draw in her high chair. This is a win-win for everyone. She loves drawing there, and we have little or no worries about any form of free flowing art on our walls. LOL.

The last thing to share today is that as you can see in the photos, we use the Fisher Price line of high chairs that are designed to strap to the top of a regular chair. This has worked incredibly well for our household and we love the design and the fact that we have a lot of flexibility in how we use it. The more interesting part is that in the last week Emily has spontaneously started climbing up and into her high chair on her own. The first time we saw her do it were were a bit caught by surprise and worried she would tumble to the tile floor. Nope. She climbs like a little monkey and simply grabs the arm rests in each arm and then basically ladders herself up to the seat and then turns around and sits down. As though she had been doing it all her life! And once seated, then the will start insisting to one of us that we put the tray in place and to giddy-up with some food, or drawing materials, depending on the circumstances. I definitely need to get some photos of Emily in action on this sometime soon.