I don’t like worksheets very much. I agree that they are, generally speaking, not great practice. No Eyes Pie Art lessons ever involve worksheets because I don’t think a worksheet, in and of itself, ever makes for an en excellent early years art activity or learning experience. On first starting work as an art teacher in a nursery I surprised that the previous teacher had given the children worksheets to colour, cut out and glue onto cardboard tubes to make, for instance, an army of identical squirrels. Where’s the creativity I thought? Where’s the attention to the individual needs of the children? And so I climbed quickly onto the NO WORKSHEETS bandwagon. Similarly I recall a story of my mother’s about my brother’s angst (25 years ago) over a maths worksheet giving simple addition questions followed by a number of pictures to colour in. I suppose the idea was that it was more fun to colour in than write numbers so the children would enjoy maths more. For my brother however – and countless others I’m sure – who knew that 2 + 3 = 5, being forced to spend 2 minutes colouring in 5 apples when they had worked out and could easily have written the answer down in seconds was not a welcome additional objective, particularly as he hates colouring in!
Enough of us work in educational settings where worksheets are frowned upon to understand why they’re bad (if you want more info here’s a great blog on the subject from pre-kpages.com). But as I have observed the children that I teach playing with different art materials in their own ways – identifying the idiosyncratic approaches to their own learning, their schemas, interests and the patterns in their play – my heart has softened toward the much maligned worksheet. Before embarking on my justification of some worksheets I must point out that I still don’t agree with the practices in my opening examples and worksheets on the whole. They indicate lazy planning without recourse to differentiation of learning objectives or any real understanding of the children who were supposed to be doing the learning.
So what makes me think worksheets aren’t all bad? Simply because, when adapted and used sensitively, they can occassionally be very helpful, I’ll give you a couple of examples:
• In a group of three year olds I observed that during a cutting activity a couple of the children were cutting around pictures that they had drawn. Some of them were cutting art straws into tiny tubes with which they did nothing, while most of them were roughly cutting across pieces of paper and sticking the resulting rectangles together – or not. Recognising that the children were, on the whole, just enjoying the process of cutting I decided to make a couple of worksheets. I drew different wiggly, straight, curved, zig-zag and spiral dotted lines on some A4 paper, drew a pair of scissors at one end and a bee, pirate ship, dinosaur or whatever at the other. The next time the children came for an art lesson these worksheets were added to the cutting resources available. The variety of lines meant that the children could choose how they used the worksheet. They met a range of abilities and provided a challenge that the children were ready for. The learning objectives were process driven – they didn’t have to prove any knowledge, there was no end product to get wrong – just some cutting to be done (which is fun) and no fear of failure.
• Another group of children were beginning to recognise that they could draw particular shapes to represent particular objects. Some of the children in the group were getting frustrated that they didn’t know how to draw what they had in mind and want adults to draw it for them. I don’t like colouring in sheets so I don’t draw pictures for children to colour in – “if I draw it then it’s my picture and I’ll take it home with me, but if you draw it it’s yours and you can take it home” I tell them. This time, I met them half way. I photocopied multiple sheets with one shape drawn on them – a circle, a trapezium, a diamond, a cross, rectangles with different aspect ratios, ambiguous bowler hat type shapes. Next time the children came to do drawing they had plain paper and shape paper to choose from. They instantly recognised the shapes as particular objects and adapted them appropriately, colouring and augmenting them and adding other details to the scene. And having made the connection between a blank, outlined shape and an object they were more able to conceive of the shapes they needed to use next time they were drawing.
In both instances the staff in the room said “I thought we weren’t allowed to give them worksheets” and I agreed “but these aren’t just worksheets…” I explained. I made these myself in direct response to the interests I had observed in the children’s play and I designed them to teach something particular as they continued to play in their own way. My aim was to enrich the provision for their child-led learning, rather than forcing them to carry out an adult-led activity on a theme that they weren’t at all interested in. I’m convinced that my homemade worksheets got more children cutting with improved accuracy than if I had asked all the children to draw their own lines to cut out – the majority would have just drawn and not wanted to cut up their picture, or just continued to chop with abandon – by bringing a little more focus for those that would choose it.
So should worksheets be banned? Not completely. But neither should they be downloaded willy-nilly from some random early years activities web-site (and I won’t provide mine). I firmly believe that a custom worksheet, thoughtfully designed by an early years educator, in direct response to observations of the children’s play and tailored specifically to those children’s needs, talents and abilities is an excellent addition to a well planned early years art activity or extra resource for enriching child-led free play. Particularly when that worksheet gives the children a choice as to how they use it and, most importantly, isn’t given to the children as an entire activity or distraction that is supposed to just keep them occupied for a while – it is definitely an optional extra.
Eyes Pie Arts 