The son walked into his new preschool talking like a man in control of his emotions. He yapped and clacked nervously telling us all what he can do in the school. His doting elder sister had told him of all the fun things that a school provides – friends, play areas, play doh, blocks, story time, circle time, the works. There was no denying the fact that he was excited. The poor fellow asked us repeatedly whether we will be coming to school with him. I assured him that on the first day, we would. We will walk him to his chair and then say ‘Bye’ and leave. He was not very happy with that, but I told him that the school was only for children and therefore, we would leave. His face fell a bit, but not much. I swelled with pride that my little boy was being a brave boy after all. He chatted happily as we made our way into the school classroom, we settled him in and turned to leave. It was only then that he realized that his sister was not going to be with him in class either, and she would leave too. He started to cry: silent, heaving sobs clinging on to his sister’s hands. He thought that when I said school was for children I meant his sister and he could stay.
Long story short, the fellow started preschool this week, and brought home his first piece of “work”. The work is (un)helpfully labelled ‘I can draw a Circle’. In my opinion, they need not have done that. Because they said ‘Circle’ I was forced to look for one in the doodle that my son produced, and it was a daunting task.
A word about his lineage might be appropriate here. The son is the grandson of two Maths teachers, and when asked to draw a circle, he sees whether can he draw two and two square and two cube circles. He experiments with Venn diagrams. He experiments with non-linear curves without curvature. He tests the hyperbolic strength of a loosely held pencil. Or he just doesn’t know what a circle is and produces the hapless picture above.
The d.sister took it and stuck it up on the wall proudly as his first art work. All fine so far. That is what a family does. They save the embarrassing first works of Art to show it to them when they unleash their creative works on you later in life as adults and show them the long path they have traversed and then smile proudly. What I was not prepared for was this.
Apparently, this study studies the first art work of children and then produces a moderate correlation to their abilities as teens. Luckily the article is as vague and under-researched and steers off clarity as a lot of articles on the Internet, and I am assured that the first piece of Art is nothing more than that. A Doodle.
Doodling does have its uses:
Happy Schooling and Doodling Dear Son.
Nourish-n-Cherish 
How sweet and how time flies eh?
That it does 🙂
It’s okay, not every child was perfectly happy on their first day! He’ll get used to his surroundings pretty quickly. He is the talkative (in a good way) type…..
Yes Shama….that he is 🙂