I've struggled mainly with two things in bringing form drawing to Jack (and now Lu). First, I've found it hard to bring an imaginative aspect to it. I can look at a form drawing book and see the sequence of suggested forms, but am not readily able to imagine the forms as images that could be from a story. Second, teaching form drawing quickly devolves into a situation where I turn into the task master making Jack do it, "Again!!! Keep your line straight! Look at your page, can't you see that it isn't straight!!!" Ughh. In my third year of homeschooling I'm finding myself much more conscious of what activities bring that out of me.
But, I knew that I wanted to do more form drawing this year, and try and catch Jack up to where he should be with it grade wise. Also, his handwriting and ability to orient himself on a page aren't great and form drawing will help with this. Lucy likes this type of thing as a challenge. Over the summer Carrie posted a great idea using Brambly Hedge books. We love Brambly Hedge. As I looked through the book, I could find lots of images to translate into forms and I realized it is much easier to start with a story and find forms than it is to start with a form and come up with a story, for me anyway!
As I mentioned before we used Steiner's indications for the first day of first grade as the basis for our first day. After we ran around looking for lines and curves we sat down and read Brambly Hedge Autumn.
Day Two
I reread Brambly Hedge and this time we looked in the book for line and curves. We found lots, of course. I pointed out the tall corn standing in straight rows, also nicely mimicked in the field behind our house. We ourselves stood straight in a line together. We used Planx blocks to make our own long rows of evenly spaced corn. We drew straight lines in the air with our fingers and then we moved to the chalk board. Jack and Lu also used their white boards for lots of practice before the form was put onto paper.
Day Three
Retold Brambly Hedge and pointed out the cupboard shelves in the Store Stump, lots of nice horizontal lines. We made these again with our Planx blocks and then made some on the board.
Then for some laughs we all tried drawing the form with our feet.
After some practice on the white boards, the form was drawn of paper which will be bound later. Then we ate a yummy snack of blackberries and cream, just like the mice of Brambly Hedge.
Day Four
This day was a Monday and the day Jack started his block on food preservation while Lucy continued with this one, so there was a little more juggling on my part. Lucy retold the story and we looked at the pictures of all the berry patches with their many thorns and brambles. We used a running form to represent the thorns.
The mice are drying lots of food in the book, so it worked well as a bridge to start Jack's week learning about drying foods. On this day I started offering Jack some trickier forms to do, mostly harder variations of the ones Lucy was doing.
Jack and Lucy also started working on a mural of Brambly Hedge. I drew in some really rough images of the little town, and they got busy on the details.
Day Five
I didn't have a form picked for today, so we looked through the book to find a good one for our last day. Lucy chose a circle, based mainly on the house of some field mice. On this day we got right to work drawing and didn't really do any body movement for the circle. I get a little tired of "moving" the forms and haven't really found a way to do it that seems to resonate. We drew big circles in the middle of the white boards. Then we drew lots of little circles in patterns.
After this we practiced drawing concentric circles, first from the outside in and then from the inside out. In the end Lucy decided to use the single large circle and the concentric circles and make two entries for her form drawing book.
I'm trying to bring a more playful attitude to form drawing. Yes, you need to be quiet and concentrate when doing your best work at the end, but it is fun to mess around with lines and curves and give yourself a bit of challenge, too. This was our most successful attempt yet, it you judge success by lack of tears.
