drawing people?

[justanotherjen]

Hold were your kids when they started drawing people?

I'm trying to remember with my other kids.  Meagan was always the artistic one of the kids.  I remember drawing people at about 3 years old.  At 3 1/2 she drew this elaborate picture with a girl at the beach.  The girl was very detailed with lips, eyelashes, fingers, toes, painted nails, etc.  I thought it was amazing that she was drawing such detailed pictures at 3.

Owen didn't start drawing people until he was 5.  He had no real interest before that but he could draw really cool looking cars and trucks at 4.  He's not super artistic but has a cute style all his own.

Brenna has fine motor issues and didn't even learn to hold a crayon/pencil correctly until she was 5.  She's 6 and still working on staying in the lines when she colors and only recently started drawing people.  They are still really crude looking but she's getting better.

And then there is Nora.  Nora won't be 3 until April.  She got a new coloring book for Christmas and was quietly coloring with Brenna.  I look down to see that, low and behold, Nora was coloring...in the lines.  She was coloring grapes (orange grapes, lol) and completely stayed in the lines with them.  She was really putting a lot of effort into it.  I looked over at Brenna's picture (mind you, she's 6) and her coloring was about the same as Nora's.

A few minutes later Nora starts getting upset.  When I got her calm enough to understand what she was saying I realized she was mad she couldn't draw something on the cover.  She wanted to draw her family.  I tried to tell her that maybe she was too little to draw people yet.

I'm glad she completely ignored me because a little later I look down and she was happily drawing a person!  It had a round head (yes she draws circles already).  A square body, circles for eyes, a half circle for a mouth and two long rectangles (well, sort of rectanglish in shape) for legs.  No arms, though.

She was very proud of her creation and now both covers are filled with drawings of people in every size imaginable.

I was shocked.

I mean, most 2 year olds don't even know how to hold a pencil correctly let alone draw detailed people.  And she holds the pencil perfectly.  She has been finding crayons and pencils and doodling on any scrap of paper she could find since she was 1.  I guess it paid off.

I wasn't planning on sending her to preschool until she was 4.  I don't think it's neccessary before then but with the way she is, so eager to learn and kind of ahead for her age I think I'm going to.  I asked her earlier if she would like to go to school in the fall and she got so excited.  She's already told me about how she is going to have her own book bag and folder and pencil and go to school like her big brother and sisters.

The preschool is just 2 days a week for 1 1/2 hours each day (ages 3-5).  Meagan went to the same one in 2004 and we know the teacher pretty good.  Meagan and Brenna have been taking classes with her for 4 years and my neighbor babysits for her.

Brenna went to a different park for preschool earlier this year but same system (twice a week) and it seems to work well.

I think she'll do really well in preschool.  They just work on letters for the most part.  One day they do a letter and then the next day they do a color or number.