HEALTH PLUS:AS PARENTS look for occupations to engage young children during the holidays, few can compete with colouring. Yes, paper and crayons, coloured pencils and felt tips for colouring, provide entertainment and developmental opportunities, writes MARIE MURRAY
Colouring is portable, time-consuming, creative and imaginative, in addition to facilitating emotional expression and artistic development in one simple activity.
Colouring employs a range of skills. It develops visual and spatial awareness. It provides a young child with a sense of mastery over his or her fine motor movements, a sense of control and coordination that is satisfying for children.
The precision of colouring in: colouring an outlined picture and choosing and confining the colours within the demarcated lines, allows additional fine tuning of motor abilities and helps a child to calibrate physical movement and negotiate eye-hand coordination in a special educative and enjoyable way. Looking through colouring-in books you can trace a child’s developing confidence and increased skill, when more colours remain inside the lines than outside them.
The most obvious learning through colouring is getting to know the names of colours and experiencing the colours as they are named, which is both a visual and an emotional experience as the beauty of colour is absorbed by a child.
Creating the colour on the page is an activity that alerts the mind to colour through two senses, vision and touch, which makes colours become even more alive in a child’s mind.
While most children know the primary colours, not all have access to the full spectrum of colour and attuning children to shades of colour develops their descriptive vocabulary in relation to colour and appreciation of colour nuances for later life.
But more than naming colours is learnt when colouring. Crayons and pencils can be counted before and after colouring, extending the learning into understanding of numbers.
Pencils may be returned to their containers in order; tidied and sharpened. Minding objects, appreciating them, placing a value on them and recognising the benefits of caring for one’s possessions are also valuable learning experiences for children.
Colouring can be free range with rainbows of colours and kaleidoscopes of graduated shades adorning the page. There is satisfaction, imagination and liberation in using whatever colour attracts and watching as it reveals itself as directed by a tiny hand and a thinking mind.
Sometimes, inadvertently, overlays of colour expose the colour spectrum and how it is composed, as combinations merge to provide yet another colour, such as red and blue providing purple. This is revelation. This is magic. This is scientific experiment in action. This is the child exploring aspects of the world and discovering that in every action there is a reaction: that he or she can be causative in creation.
Watching how children colour gives insight into their perception of the world. Are colours portrayed as found in nature? Is the grass green? Is the sky blue the sun yellow? Or is ‘reality’ challenged, is reality what the child decides that it is, wishes it to be and so creates it that way?
What about free drawing? What about family portraits? How are family members portrayed and proportioned? Are they aligned neatly or scattered across the page. Are they juxtaposed according to their relationships with each other, their communication with each other and their wish to be ‘drawn’ together?
Are those who are drawn large, emotionally big in the child’s life? Are those whom they do not like minimised, omitted or abandoned to the far corner of the page? Who is smiling? Whose eyes are open, whose are closed? Who is playing and who is standing still?
Drawing is an activity for indoors on a rainy day or outside when the sun is shining, when colours are polished and vividly present for a child to observe.
Drawing implements are not just for colouring time: encouraging children to draw what they see when they are in the garden, or on an outing, when they are at the sea, or in the park, or looking at animals or plants, enhances observation, perception and appreciation of the world in which they live.
Drawing nature connects a child to the beauty of nature, the detail in nature, its shapes and colours and shades, so that it might be preserved as their drawings are preserved for posterity.
- Clinical Psychologist Marie Murray is the Director of Student Counselling Services in UCD.