Tamara Duran

Amber Ward

October 19, 2014

Art 133

Unit Paper 4

Children dont have very long to enjoy the pleasure of play. Many adults try to

have children do things more proper and try to have them grow up too fast. Doing so

causes children to loose the chance to explore the world around them and the chance to be

creative. When children are playing this allows them to do independent exploration and

create avenues to see things in fresh ways, to discover, and to invent (Szekely, 2012,

p.133). Children explore through play in various ways like experimenting with their food,

climbing, bouncing and exploring, having private play spaces, animating objects, using

various items as clothes, breaking and fixing objects, making messes and cleaning them,

and crawling under or going into things. All of this is normal for children to do for play

and in doing play they find ways of making art. Playing builds and maintains all the

essential ingredients in making art (Szekely, 2012, 139) which brings joy when making

art. I would hope that when teaching that I can continuously have the children be joyful

when working on their artwork.

As a teacher I would want the element of play to be something that is maintained

in my classroom somehow. I would go about this by have a certain amount of days in the

month to be free for all days where the students could use any materials in anyway,

while still being supervised, for their own personal art project for that day. Other ways I

would go about this would also be through some of the projects done during studio time
in class such as the finger puppets or playing in nature. Possibly also having students

make their own version Sounndsuits. Doing these types of activities would allow the

students to explore the world, their imagination, and would allow them to be as creative

as they want to be.

Reference

Szekely, George. Testing the World Through Play and Art. Text.