Show and Tell

I'm cheating this week. This is from a post I published some weeks ago. Tomorrow is back to school for my son and I wanted to show one of his masterpieces, the art critic being his mom, of course.

Last year in school, as part of his end-of-year test (can't understand why 1st graders actually need to be tested, but that's material for another post), he was asked to illustrate his interpretation of life. If you ask me, that's a pretty heavy-duty topic for a 6-year-old with hardly any life experience. Anyhow, I think he came up with a magnificent depiction of life's treacherous ways through a maze. Ok, I know, I'm his mom and I think everything he does is wonderful. But just bear with me here.

You have to start at the top left, where you find a little pink fish (actually, facing the wrong direction) that has to find his way through the maze to get to the pond because fish can't survive out of water. Along the way he has to collect "suns" and avoid the "storms". I asked him why there so many suns and so few storms and he said that's just how life is (the naivety of children). He said the fish will also find lots of other beautiful things throughout his journey - a castle full of treasures, love, balloons (celebrations).

My son is a very logical thinker and practically all his pictures involve mazes or some sort of problem-solving task, not always obvious to the observer. It's a personality trait. He loves chess, chinese checkers, monopoly & any type of strategy game. His teacher gave him a "C" for this picture because she couldn't understand it without his explanation and the picture had to be crystal clear. Excuse me, but what do you expect when you give kids a topic like this? She wanted something more along the lines of a house, trees, birds, flowers, etc.

I told my son not to worry because I was ever so proud of the creativity put into this thought-provoking drawing.