Jaime Bruce- The Joy of Art in the Early Years

Today on the blog we are joined by our wonderful guest blogger Jaime Bruce(Follow on Instagram here at https://www.instagram.com/jaybruce/. Jaime is an early years teacher from Australia who works in London. Her setting is play based, with a strong focus on sustained shared thinking, child-lead activities, and following individual interests.  Jaime 's guest blog today focuses on the joy of art. 

Walk inside the Early Years at my school, and the first thing you do is duck under the paintings and mobiles that hang from washing lines and “make-shift galleries” hanging everywhere. Head outside, and the chalk is in full use, the water colour paints are being liberally thrown at the prepared paper, and leaves and sticks are carefully lined up into patterns in the mud kitchen. The real joy of art in the Early Years, is that there is absolutely no definition of what really constitutes “art”. It permeates through every aspect of a child’s day: from a casual mark-make on the whiteboard of their mum, or a fleeting interest in dipping a brush in some colour before running away, to a longer engagement in some clay work… children are being artists around the clock.

I’ve seen a lot of little artists come through the Early Years. Every year I am amazed by what children can create, how energetically they engage with materials, and the level of submersion they achieve as they lose themselves in creative processes. Anybody who works in Early Years settings knows that it doesn’t matter what you ‘intend’ a child to produce when you set up an art activity; they will do as they please. You might want them to paint a picture of a bear using a small world bear as stimulus- they may want to cover the small world bear in paint and roll it in the sandpit. Who is to say that isn’t art!? Art is a message, a feeling, an instinct and often confusing to the observer, right? When you ask a child, “can you tell me about your drawing?”, you might be sure their answer will be “its a red car”, only to be told “that’s my sister and we are going in the forest”. Those sorts of descriptions truly remind me of the plaques which hang beside paintings in the Tate Modern; “Lightning with stag in it’s glare” by Joseph Beuys comes to mind!

Art, for me and my teaching philosophy, has become central to almost everything I do with children. Making anything new is art. Art is, more often than not, transient and cannot be kept. Art can be found in the water tray as children experiment with different ways to make the water move, and then try to recreate it again and again. Repetition is art, and that can be with patterns in crayon, or movement, or number, or song. Art is noticing, recording, being observant, and being collaborative.

Don’t be afraid to give children the language they need to express themselves in art. Artistic vocabulary extends to emotions and can deepen a child’s understanding of the world and their place in it. A little boy once said to me as he gave me his charcoal drawing, “Jaime, do you like my moody picture, or does it make you tired?” If that isn’t the musings of an artist, I don’t know what is!

For more support on creative teaching and learning check out the Hygge in the Early Years Accreditation here