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!