We Dot That Right!

This morning the students in Room 503 painted dots. Well, one dot - at first - to be specific. And, more specifically, a red dot.

Though it was just one dot of paint, and could be placed anywhere on the paper each student wanted to place it, the students' repsonses to this exercise were very interesting:

"It was kind of wierd. I thought if we did a red dot that we would turn it into something."

"It was just a red dot. There was no importance to it - like it wasn't supposed to exist."

"I thought that it was fun and it was cool to paint one little smidge of paint..."

"Calm, happy and curious thoughts came to me."

"I was thinking when I put the red dot on my paper that this was going to be one of Ms. Pitman's reflection activities, not painting for nothing."

"...I also thought: 'will mine be the most terrible in the class/will mine be worse than others?'"

"...It seemed peaceful."

"I thought why would we just do one dot when there is so much more paper? I wanted to move my brush to make it bigger, but I wouldn't have followed [Ms. Pitman's] directions."

On a second piece of paper, the students were asked to put down another dot. But this time they were asked to keep the brush on the paper and paint until the paint ran out (without taking their brush off of the paper).

The artist Paul Klee once said: "A line is a dot that went for a walk." And, as one of the students aptly thought: "...this was going to be one of Ms. Pitman's reflection activities, not painting for nothing." And reflect they did.

Many expressed their desire to get the dot "right" and wondered how their dot compared to the other students'. That's a lot of pressure caused by a measly little red dab of paint. Some of the students also didn't like being confined to one dot, or to not being able to lift up their brush.

When presented with a third piece of paper, the students were encouraged to paint however they liked: within the structure of using only lines and dots. What a myriad of line-dot pictures we had: each unique unto itself.

Dot's the truth!

Cheers,
Ms. Pitman