Frankie's Art These Days

Frankie's art has evolved, again. She's been drawing more and more people, in more elaborate ways. This has been so fun! My favorite thing about this new phase, however, is that most of this is self-initiated. I don't usually take the time to set up crafts for her (although when I do she loves them!). I just leave paper, scissors, tape, glue, markers and pencils where she can get them, and she helps herself to them.

She decided to make a person on a paper bag tonight while I was making dinner:



After she showed me this, I suggested that maybe she could make hand-puppets with some brown paper lunch bags. Yes! She snatched the bags from me after I showed her how she could put them on her hand and make them "talk" and then pretty soon she was asking me how to spell the various members of our family (Rebecca and MacGyver, you guys made the cut).

Here's Dex - he's got a crazy red beard and he's wearing his dinosaur shirt (who he insists is an alligator, see "Not Percy"). Frankie informed me that in this puppet version, the dinosaur is dead.



This was another one she did tonight while I was making dinner. The mini boden catalog came, and while I love their clothes we rarely order anything from them. She likes to cut them up instead. Tonight I suggested she paste them onto a paper and draw in a girl wearing the clothes she picked out. This is what she came up with:


It's fall (those are leaves falling), and this girl is wearing both a short-sleeved t-shirt and a hoodie. And she's holding a bag - a girl's gotta think about her accessories!

This is a snowman wearing a hat with a pom-pom and a scarf. It's snowing, and that's a tree next to the snowman.


This one was done at school, when the lady from Historic New England came to visit. They'd just read The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown. I was the parent teacher that day, and it was really fun to watch the girls at her table feed off each other to make their pictures more and more elaborate.

On the right there is a scarecrow, with eggs on his head.  On the right there is a sun, some eggs.

When you open the barn doors you can see a cow at the bottom lying on some hay, the egg-laying chicken towards the top left, and a cat drinking some milk on the top left.

One of the small groups at preschool she often chooses is journaling - the kids write letters in this group. This is a letter she wrote to Dex:

This is what was inside:

It's a roller coaster, which is really sweet because one of Dexter's favorite library books right now is called Harriet and the Roller Coaster. I really love that she thought about him in this way while she was away from him at school.

The other thing she does a lot is write letters. I love this stage, because she'll write random letters down and then ask me what it says. Usually in the letters you can pick out "Frankie", "Mom", and "Dex". She's preferring to write Frankie these days (instead of Frances - it was Frances for a long time), and it usually comes out "Franike". Really close!


She's also adding stories to her pictures. We bought her some nice pencils at the art supply store in Central Square after church on Sunday, and this is one of her drawings. The "story" (that she had me write on the back) is below the picture.


"It's snowing, and there is one drop of snow going in the chimney. The biggest one is Momma (because she's the oldest), the Daddy, then Frankie, and the smallest one is Dexter. Dexter is standing on a stool so he can see the rest of the family. At the bottom, there is grass, and at the top there is snow and a chimney. There are leaves on the side of the house." By Frankie, age 4.