Tips for making Art with your preschooler fun:

Last week I ran my first workshop for preschoolers and it was a huge amount of fun. The main aim of the session was for the children to have fun discovering and experimenting with tools and materials, while the parents could relax and not worry about cleaning up, and we were successful!

It was certainly not the first time I have made Art with preschoolers. My daughter is three, and I often run end up having impromptu Art and Craft sessions with her and her buddies at home.
Kudos to my poor, long-suffering husband for keeping his cool as he looks on helplessly, while the tots dip their hands into bowls of paint with looks of evil intent on their faces.

I love these sessions and am incredibly gung-ho about my daughter experimenting with Art materials, however I realize that I am in the minority here. Many parents I know feel (understandably) scared and stressed at the thought of making Art with their preschoolers.

Over the years I have developed my own system for making Art sessions as easygoing and stress free as possible. Predictably, one of the main elements of this is organization. Before the preschooler workshop, my saintly husband helped me wrap our beautiful orange sofa in plastic, so that when purple paint was spattered on it I could relax and smile dismissively at the accident.

I also have a background in Art. I am a practicing Artist, and before starting my own business, I taught Art to upper elementary, middle school and high school students for five years. This experience has helped me to form a set of beliefs and principles about the role of Art in Education, which in turn informs the way I approach Art with children.

In case anyone out there is interested, here are tips I would give the parent of a preschooler for making Art with your child more fruitful and enjoyable:

• Keep it short and simple. The moment your child begins to look bored or distracted, stop the activity.
• Focus more on the process than the end result. Preschoolers are still developing fine motor skills. Simple activities such as folding and pasting can be challenging for them. Give them plenty of positive feedback, and don't stress too much about the outcome.
• Join in the fun. Kids love to do what you do. If you sit down and experiment as well, it will be more fun for your child.
• Do not 'color within the lines'. It is not developmentally appropriate for a preschooler to be focusing on keeping within the lines, and working neatly. This can kill creativity. Get rid of the rules, and watch your child's skills develop.
• Mix it up. Tots love tactile play. It helps them learn about the world around them and develop their motor skills. Mix up the materials you use. Experiment with paint one day, clay another day, and feathers and beads later - it will keep them on their toes.
• Organize before you start. Think beforehand of what may stress you out. If you worry about getting paint on your table, cover it with scrap paper or plastic, and put an overall on your child. Always clear a safe place to store wet work before the mayhem starts!
• Clean up together. Get your child into a clean-up routine. Show him/her how to wash brushes etc and over time cleaning up will get easier.
• Do not make Comparisons. All children develop at different rates. Please do not worry too much about your child being less adept at something than another child. Your child can, and will, pick up on this feeling and it will make him/her self-conscious.
• Have fun! Making Art together should not stress you or your child out. The aim is to enjoy yourself and make your child want to do this again. Explore and experiment without setting too many expectations on your child or yourself. If things don't turn out the way you expected, it's ok!

Good luck!

You are from WHERE?

Being a British Indian who lives in the USA, is a particularly strange and sometimes confusing condition.

My parents moved to England when I was just a year old. I grew up totally in London, all of my schooling took place in London. I went to college in Winchester and London, I have a British passport, and only moved across the pond at the age of 28 because the man I intended to marry was based here.

Five years on, I live a comfortable and happy life with my husband and daughter in a suburb of Washington DC. However, I still sometimes yearn for the grime, and buzz of London. I dream of Mince Pies and Top of the Pops specials (look it up) at Christmas, and the words 'blimey' and 'git' are a natural part of my vocabulary.

I am a Londoner - not a fake Dick Van Dyke cockney - a proper Londoner. I did grow up in a pretty traditional Indian family, surrounded by a tight knit Indian community. However, like most of the second and third generation British Indians in London I know, I have always felt VERY much a Londoner. This was never questioned by any of my non-Indian British friends in London. It was just taken for granted that I was one of them. I felt and sounded like a Londoner.

However, since moving to the USA, my identity has been in dispute. I have been surprised, and sometimes taken aback, by people's expressions when they hear my accent. There is often a raising of eyebrows followed by "your English is very good". Very often, when I mention that I am from England, I get the response "no you're not" or "but where are you really from?"

Last month, a client commented that he couldn't get used to my accent "your voice and face don't seem to match up" he said. Could you ever imagine the outrage the above comments would provoke if they were made to an African American?

Many people who have been confounded by my accent, seemed to assume that Britain is made up of Caucasian people, and to be fair, this has been influenced by the media's representation of British culture over here.
I would like people to understand that, just like the USA, Britain is made up of people with different cultural heritages and Ethnic backgrounds.

This whole discussion brings up a deeper issue about how nationality is perceived by us. It seems to me that it is time to start thinking more deeply about questions of identity. What it is really that makes somebody British, or American, or Indian, or all three?
Interesting food for thought in a world that is rapidly getting smaller and smaller!

Reforming our attitudes towards food

Last Friday, my 3 year old daughter's preschool had a Halloween party. Parents were asked to sign up on a sheet to bring in food, the options being: Fruit, Vegetables, Crackers, Cookies, Brownies and 'Other'. I signed up to take fruit and crackers in, wanting to provide something healthy for the tots. However, I noticed that I was one of very few parents who were thinking this way. The majority of parents had signed up to bring in cookies and brownies - does a class this young need this much sugar??

At the actual party, the teacher did not bother to even open the fruit plates I and two other parents had bought in, or the crackers. She did, however, fill each child's plate with five different, luridly colored cookies, I wonder what actually happened to the healthy snacks.
The interesting thing was that none of the children ate all of their cookies, a few ate one or two, most ate none. My daughter, who doesn't like sugary food kept asking the teacher for crackers and was ignored. The outcome of this was that the majority of children in the class ate no snack at all.

I am concerned that we are programming children to eat junk food, even when they are not naturally inclined towards it. It should be our job as responsible adults (especially those of us who work with children) to encourage healthy eating habits.

If our children are ever going to grow up eating healthily, we need to change our own attitudes and vocabulary when referring to food. It is often burnt into our children's pysches that sweets are rewards and treats. My daughter's teacher asked 'Wouldn't it be great if we got treats like this everyday at snack time?' and my daughter, who dislikes the taste of sugar, and is naturally inclined towards healthier food (lucky, lucky me) screamed "Yes! Yes" in support of the idea. She pretends to like cake, because "everyone does".
On the other hand, I overheard a parent in a restaurant telling her child" I know broccoli is yucky, but you have to try eating some"- hardly a statement to make you want to try the vegetable.

I am part of a group called Moms Rising who have been lobbying for healthier meals in schools. Moms Rising recently reported that current standards set by the US Department of Health for school meals are so vague, that many schools use fruit juice as a replacement for fresh fruit in meals. My daughter's preschool does offer fresh fruit, but often throws in potato chips as a vegetable choice ???? This is really not an area where corners should be cut.

As a child growing up in Britain, I had my own share of unhealthy and, frankly, unpalatable school meals, but that was in the 1980s. There has recently been a major reform in the way schools think about food in England. Celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver have helped to devise healthy and balanced meals for public schools that don't taste like cardboard, and the days of loading up your plate with a hotdog and fries are slowly disappearing. I think it is high time the US followed suit.

While I am on the subject. We are living in a diverse, multicultural society. It is also about time that schools started to offer options for children with dietary restrictions. Ooh, and wouldn't it be nice to expose them to food from different cultures rather than dumbing down their palates with mac and cheese and peanut butter sandwiches.
I have yet to find a school that offers vegetarian food for my child, and expect to be packing her lunches every day for many years to come. Although, that may not be such a terrible thing, given the current attitudes towards food at many schools.

Attitudes towards art

Well here is another post after a very long absence. I haven't got used to blogging yet. There is not much to say on a regular basis that I think would be riveting to other people.

Anyway, during my marketing frenzy, I have noticed something - something not very surprising, but it irks me all the same.
It is a very rare thing for an Indian parent to show any interest in an Art camp. Science and Math camp sure! But even if a child is begging for Art classes, they are seen as a waste of time.

For many Indians, Art is seen as unimportant - even for very young children. It is often viewed as an enhancement activity, something to keep kids busy after all of the serious learning. Often as a teenager, when I professed an interest in studying Art, family friends would say to me "study something serious, you can always keep Art as a hobby".
This, of course, exists beyond the Indian community. Often when teaching Art in Middle and High schools, teachers in other subject areas would ask me to change what I was teaching so that it would tie in with their curriculum ("we are studying Ancient Greece, it would be lovely if you could make pots with the kids"). The thing is, like all other subjects, Art has it own set of rules, principles and basic elements which have to be learnt. Classes cannot be arbitrarily changed unless they fit into a set curriculum.

The bottom line is, Art is not a subject that requires no thought - in fact a great deal of critical thought and problem solving is required when studying its formal elements. A good Art education changes the way a student thinks and approaches problems. It can improve students skills in other subjects, and it can teach students who learn differently how to understand and master things in their own way. It goes far beyond 'painting pretty pictures'.

So we are slowly getting spots filled up for the fall camps. It is more difficult than I thought it would be to get the word out! I have posted flyers at schools and put adverts in PTA directories. The PTAs have been really positive about the website - which gives me hope!

I have been trying to find a contact at Fairfax County to pitch my ideas to, but it is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

I've had some more ideas for camps. I thought we could run a Land Art camp, get students to work outdoors investigating their environment, and produce work related to it. Also, I like the idea of medieval and gothic art camp - making gargoyles etc. Amy and I are Harry Potter addicts. Maybe we should just have a Harry-Potter-watching-camp? Only kidding!

With all this shameless self marketing, I have hardly had any time to work on the illustrations for the book. I'll post some images when I get started.

The first summer camp

Well my house is trashed, but what a fantastic experience. I must be the only person I know, who gets withdrawal symptoms after a camp - I miss those kids!

The choice of Fairytales for our theme was perfect. The students were totally engaged and excited about their work. It was quite an intense, exhausting camp, but we wanted it to be stimulating, and more than just glorified babysitting. So many camps just let students space out for the majority of the day, we figured that if parents were paying for our services, we should be doing something meaningful with their children.

We got really positive feedback from all of the parents. Now all we have to do is convince more people of our ideas, especially in Fairfax County!

After talking to some of the parents, Amy and I have decided that it would be a good idea to run mini camps on Teacher Work Days, and some of those other little holidays that parents find difficult to take off. I wonder if schools would be interested in us running those on-campus, so that students could be dropped off as usual in the morning (it might save my carpet as well!).