When a child shows extreme interest in a subject matter, creating invitations to build upon their curiosity honors their learning process by letting them be active collaborators. While it may steer away from your planned lessons, curriculum, concepts or theme, it provides for a meaningful experience to guide a child's exploration in something they are interested in.
Recently Cy has been completely enamored with cars. So my wheels are already spinning with ideas to create invitations to provide more opportunities to explore cars. The book All Kinds of Cars by Carl Johanson is a fantastic whacky filled visual collection of cars that we read every night. I just had to bring these silly images onto a larger scale for him to see. He has also really been into coloring, so naturally a big butcher paper of the images from the story had to happen.
Coloring is a gradual process. By offering toddler thick sturdy materials such as these tempera sticks is a great way for your child to explore and experiment. It's all about putting their hands with these tools and letting them scribble and color all over the place rather than give instructions and color in the lines. Obviously as you can see I had some fun and colored along with him, which brought about so much more language and engagement. The more exposure a child gets early on will only give them more confidence in what they can achieve to make them feel more independent.
While this isn‘t 100% process art driven it has great value to create an invitation such as this that makes them feel as active collaborators in their learning process. A butcher paper filled with what they are interested deepens their literacy skills in connection to the book, makes the child pay attention to all the details in the drawings, enhance color recognition, fine motor skills, and provide more language development.