The Bub in the Belly

We are pretty excited about what Ryan drew last night!

The night before, Richard introduced the watercolour paper to Ryan. Ryan has worked with watercolour before but not on watercolour paper. He was very excited and last night, he actually asked Richard to set up the art table for him again!

In addition to his usual art pieces, he made this.

The first thing he did was to write "Elmo" at the bottom in blue. Richard said, "Elmo is red!", so Ryan wrote "Elmo" in red directly above the blue "Elmo". Then, using the blue watercolour again, Ryan drew a face! Can you see it on the left? Two eyes, one nose and a smile! After that, Ryan used the red watercolour and drew another smiling face (in the middle) and a sad face (on the right)! Then he wrote the word "sad". Ryan had been playing all day with an Elmo hand puppet, so it was not surprising that Elmo was prominent in his thoughts.

It's the faces that we are excited about! We know that Ryan could write and spell, plus we know that he is aware what happy and sad mean, but this is the first time that we've seen him draw a face. He must have seen some similar images somewhere, because we have not taught him to use dots for the eyes/nose and a curved line for the mouth. Drawing faces is supposed to be a developmental milestone for his age, so it's really good news to know that he's right on track.

Ryan did everything on his own, completely unaided. I wasn't even there, I was editing a movie in another room. Richard told me what he had drawn and I asked Ryan as well. Ryan said "Happy Elmo" and "Sad Elmo" when I asked him what it was. When I pointed to the dots for the nose and asked him what's that, he cheekily sniffed a few times (to signify his nose). When I pointed to the dots for the eyes and asked him what's that, he blinked his eyes!

We are really excited! Well done, son!