My 6 year old daughter, The Bee, stays up late every night, sometime later than I do, drawing and making books full of characters, with plot lines and humor and detailed drawings of their expressions and outfits.
In the morning, she shows me her stories. Sometimes we add words to them. We have stacks and stacks of these books in our house. We don’t say, “Maybe you will become an author and an illustrator one day.” because she already is. She has sold her books to friends and family and to strangers at a yard sale to earn money for something she wanted to buy.
As time passes, her drawings become more detailed. When we read books together, which is often, she studies the expressions of the characters, the shadows, the details of the way feet look when someone is illustrated as running or jumping.
This is how we feed her imagination. We could insist that she go to bed, lights out by a certain time each night, because that’s what 6 year olds are supposed to do, right? They shouldn’t be up at 10 or 11 o’clock every night, should they?
We made only a few half-hearted attempts to get her to go to sleep earlier back when she was five. Realizing that this was her most creative time of day, we switched gears, and instead, we ask her, as she heads upstairs for the night, “Do you have enough drawing paper?” This is her great imagination time.
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Over at Kiwi Crate this week, we’ve been having some Valentine fun with Conversation Heart math. Stop by and see how we customized this activity for various ages and math levels.
Love this post.
A series of books that we all love at our house are the Don’t Let the Pigeon… books. Don’t let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late, The Pigeon Wants a Hot Dog, etc. They are AWESOME. The illustrations are the bomb, the facial expressions of a cartoon pigeon are amazing, and the dialogue sounds pretty much like every 4 or 5 year old I’ve ever met. They are great, and have inspired several hand-drawn Pigeon books at our house.
Your daughter might get a kick out of them (if you don’t have them already).
My 6 year old daughter is also a night owl. Always the last of the kids to be asleep. I, too, tried out the edict – enough with the pens and pencils in bed! lights out! – but, now see that we can’t change that, indeed, evening time seems to be a VERY creative time for her. Up until now, we have simply ignored that she is STILL up and working in bed, but after reading your post, I am inspired to more thoroughly embrace it. Tomorrow night, I will ask her if she needs more supplies!