Today was our first session back after Christmas. It seems like it has been a long break. Mrs Wilson and I had planned carefully in the meantime, looking at what was working and what areas needed more focus. For this session we decided to ask the children to draw each other. The session started with that invitation: choose a partner and draw each other. The children had some questions about media and length of time. We decided that they could choose within a selection that Mrs Wilson provided and that the pose would last 10 minutes. All of the children drew their partner at the same time as their partner was drawing them. We didn’t intervene.

When the time was up we looked at the drawings and reflected. What would the class do differently if they were drawing their partner again? They thought that they should take turns to draw each other. We continued to experiment throughout the morning, doing short poses where the children were asked not to look at the page and longer poses where they did. We tried drawing the backs of heads and profile drawings using pencil. Within the pairs the children also took photos of full face, profile and back of head.

It was interesting how many children looked at the page during the not-looking-at-the-page experiment. Some of them had trouble sitting still for the longer poses.

There was a lot of laughter when they looked at the results of the not-looking experiments. They thought that it was hard not looking at the page:

“You didn’t know where your pencil was going or how it would turn out.”

The children described these drawings as messy, scribbly, funny and weird but thought that they were more interesting than the more accurate representational drawings. Mrs Wilson thought that they were funky and they reminded me of Picasso. That can’t be a bad thing.

The profile was a real challenge but they did very well with it -very impressed. I showed them a Man Ray photo of Lee Miller and we talked about the idea first. It’s quite hard for the younger children to get their heads around the idea of drawing a person but only putting one eye and one ear on the page.

What was really fascinating for me was that although we had to conduct the session with big technical obstacles -no sound for part of the time, getting shut out of the session repeatedly -we all still really enjoyed it. At the end of the session I asked the children what age group of people they had been drawing and they said children. How could they draw someone from a different age group? They suggested that they could draw their nanny or granda at home or their mum or dad or an older cousin who was a teenager or a baby brother or sister. That has become their homework and they will post the results to me between now and the next session. They have decided to do two drawings -both full face and of the same person: a 1 minute not-looking-at-the-page pose and a longer 10 minute version. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with.