magic forest part two

My aim was to encourage the children to draw trees onto the paint and tissue paper forest base... but I soon discovered there was not enough interest in this - yes one of the children was interested in looking at images of trees and then having a practice at drawing a tree of her own before drawing a tree on the fist part of the magic forest. The others also had a go, but soon gave up, preferring to just let their pen scribble all over the paper...

So OK, the focus to DRAW trees is not there yet...

back to the drawing board for me... my idea now is to get the glue-guns out and let the children glue on bits of trees onto the background instead.

I did, though, successfully plant the idea of each background not belonging to an individual child, but that they belong to all of us and that we each create a step in the story of the magic forest. And there was no problem for these children to have someone else continue on their background or for them to work on someone elses backgrounds... although only two of the children felt that they were ready to go from the practice stage to the draw on the background stage. The others looked at their "scribbles" and realised that they had gone from drawing a tree to dancing with their pen and creating something else - they could all tell me what they had created - and they were not trees and therefore they did not want to draw trees on the background...

No interest. So we leave this step. And we will see if the glue-gun and tree parts (twigs, cones, seeds etc) offer the children a better opening to creating something forest/tree like...

I think, to be honest, I knew this would happen... I knew they were not really ready for this... BUT I wanted to chellenge them. I did not want my presumptions to limit them. I wanted to give them the opportunity to show me their growing skills. So even though this did not work as i hoped it did sort of work as I expected, but that I was leaving the door open for the children to prove me wrong...
AND that door has to be left open... I have to remember to keep challenging the children in a way that allows them to grow but not to make them feel small...