Enhancing Artistic Qualities: Teaching Children To Draw

 

Learning to draw is indeed fun and educational for kids. While teaching, teacher must make sure learning is balanced, and not too restrictive. Otherwise it won’t enhance their creative skills; the child should have some free time with no creative limitations. Your coaching should inspire the child to be imaginative and it must reflect in his drawings.
 
Drawing can encourage observation and recollection and it also is a medium to vent out ideas and feelings. Teacher must allow children to develop this through drawing and sketching.

Technique one: Teaching Drawing Using Observation and Recollection Method

The method aims to encourage children to perceive and to describe the world around them. Under this technique, you can give assignment to students to draw themselves by looking in a mirror, draw a map showing your route from home to school, and include local landmarks, draw an important event from memory or draw their favorite toy or superhero. Other interesting projects could be to draw bug collections or still-life display or use a magnifying glass to draw enlarged views of water drops, hair, plant leaves, etc.

The method: Ask child to do contour drawing of object displayed in the classroom. Ask students to do examine the object for one minute and then put the object away. Now, ask children to draw using their memory from what they remember about the object.

Technique two: Teaching Drawing Creative Expressions

The purpose is to encourage children to use their imagination and express their ideas and feelings through drawing. Teacher can ask the child to draw the expression he sees on people faces, to draw emotions of sadness, happiness, crying etc. Give assignments like – to design a machine to help the president or design a machine that makes peanut butter, draw an image to show how you would weigh an elephant, draw a picture of a chocolate factory, design an underground city, design a dog-exercising machine etc.

Benefits of Drawing for Children – Drawing helps children in plenty of ways but some of the core qualities developed by drawing are: 

• It strengthens fine motor skills in children. 
• Enhances creative and artistic skills. 
• Also, helps in improvising reading and writing. 
• Instills confidence in children 
• Drawing helps children to identify emotions, feelings and sensations. 
• Sharpens communication skills with others. 
• Plays role in formation of personality and develops psychological maturity.
• Drawing stimulates the brain to grow in the areas that shows how to observe.

Tips For Reducing Teaching Stress

Teaching is one of the demanding careers that require you to deal with classroom stress. Not only does stress come from teaching, but also comes along when you juggle your personal and professional life. Stress is not just a mental factor, but it is a physical factor as well. Taking care of your body and mind is paramount and that's not an easy task.

Teachers have to deal with classroom hassles, afternoon meetings and have to complete obnoxious amount of paperwork and report cards; all this certainly lays immense pressure on them. Teachers must adopt strategies for avoiding burnouts and making improvements in their outlook and attitude.

Simple tips can be followed by them, which can be very helpful-

Engage Yourself In Connecting With students- Often when we get stressed-out, we tend to disengage ourselves from the surroundings. Organizing such activities allows you to relax and enjoy, thereby helps you to connect with students. Cooperative learning activities within the classroom or group discussions can prove to be highly fruitful for building the camaraderie between teachers and students. Also, such active involvement facilitates a sense of control and empowerment. 

Maintain Balance - Teaching job, no doubt is a delicate one. Therefore, teachers need to maintain psychological and physical balance. Our society expects teachers to be educationally and emotionally well.  However, teachers experience a number of varied pressures and stressors like taking work home, dealing with difficult students and pressure from parents, teachers’ evaluation, ongoing learning etc. They must learn to balance all these pressures and empower them.

Keep Yourself Motivated - Remember why you opted for this profession. Keep those reasons close to your heart while teaching and when you are stressed. It can really help you to remain motivated. Remind yourself about goals in life and set priorities. Having direction makes situation more meaningful.

Remain Positive -  Try and remain positive no matter what. Keep faith and believe in what you are doing. Time and again remind yourself, what impact your attitude is creating on kids who see you and idolize you in school.

Take a Break – Do things you like, for example:-go for travel, watch your favorite show or sitcom, listen to soothing music etc. A little time spent in joyful activities will definitely avoid any serious burnouts in future.

So, one must eat healthy and always remain optimistic which will certainly be beneficial in reducing stress. Try and implement couple of these ideas to make you feel more relaxed.