Educating Risa

Gareth has been creating lots of art around the house lately. He often uses the white board that I write our math ‘Problem of the Day’ on:

I also find things like this on the board. Gareth is showing his scientific knowledge, drawing different species of dinosaur and putting them into their correct time period (C, J, and T stand for Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic):

Another day, he wanted to draw eight different species and put them in their own boxed off area of the board. Gareth was surprised to learn that to by drawing only 7 lines, he made 8 boxes:

In the finished work I could identify a few of the species: a triceratops middle left, a pterodactyl lower left, an ankylosaur lower right (plating and club tail), etc.

Another day we made biscuits to have with our soup, and Gareth insisted on getting out the dinosaur cookie cutters. I have to admit the T rex and Stegosaurus biscuits were pretty fun:

But it’s not ALL dinos around here. I also found Gareth doing some prehistoric sea creatures (sea scorpion, jellyfish, and unknown):

And this one I found most interesting of all, as it never would have occurred to me to use the craft sticks in this way. This is Gareth’s fox. He is just finishing with the ears on the triangle-shaped head (with whiskers), neck-splayed legs-body, and bushy tail:

I look forward to finding more of his art around the house soon. I do want to emphasize that none of these were in any way my idea. I doubt that I would have gotten such creativity by saying “draw 8 creatures on the white board’ or ‘create an animal of craft sticks on the floor’.  But as Gareth seems very into art right now, I make sure to leave sticks, blocks, paper, crayons, markers, etc. within easy access for him at all times. “A teacher’s job is observe her students, and to prepare the learning environment.” –Maria Montessori (paraphrased).