One of my favorite things to sit back and watch, recently, is the way Rebecca approaches drawing.  I am certainly not claiming she’s any kind of artistic prodigy.  But from a developmental standpoint, she is showing a lot more detail and precision.  When she first got the hang of crayons and markers, of course, it was your typical scribbled mass.  Finger paints, in particular, always ended up a big brown-ish blob.

Then she started to move from scribbling back and forth to a more circular motion.  Round and round and round she went.  She loved making circles.

Now, though, I’ve noticed that she has been drawing more small, separate shapes.  Even with finger paints, it’s  a dab here, a dab there, a line here, an arc there.  A strategically placed handprint.

She’s also started actually telling me what it is she’s drawing.  Sometimes, I think she makes a mark and then decides it looks like an oval or the number 7 or something.  But the other day, out at lunch, I saw her draw something intentionally for the first time.

She had made a small, loopy shape that started to look like a face. M picked up another crayon and made two marks for eyes.  Rebecca, then, made a round mark on either side of the circle for ears, and scribbled at the top for hair.  Narrating her intent as she was doing it.

I love watching this shift as it’s happening.  And, if I can be so bold as to make a prediction, I wonder if she is going to really gravitate towards learning to write when she starts school in September.  Being a Montessori program, of course, she’s free to choose her activities as she likes.  And I’m sure she’ll like the drawing and painting things.  But even now, she will sometimes tell me that she’s drawing letters and numbers, so I wonder if she’s going to seize the opportunity to figure out the real deal.  Time will tell…