Are you looking for an easy no-preparation creative activity for your kids? Have you heard of squiggle drawing?
I like to challenge my kids to be creative and think out of the box, that’s why I often propose them creative challenges. Squiggle drawing is one of them.
All you need for a squiggle drawing is a sheet of paper, a pen or pencil and your imagination. I did this recently with my kids and it was SUPER fun.
This is how you do a squiggle drawing: Take some index cards, or just cut/tear a piece of A4 paper into 4 and you draw a random line or shape on each piece. Then hand one to your kid and challenge him to continue the drawing and make something meaningful out of it. This way you are asking your kids to think creatively and to expand upon a pre-existing image.
To make it more fun, I worked with 2 or more cards with the same squiggle drawing on it. The challenge was to draw something new or different on each paper, starting from the same starting squiggle.
For the first squiggle drawing we started from 2 ovals. This first time I joined in with Victoria to introduce her to the concept. I drew a boy – as you can see I’m not having the best drawing skills – while Victoria did some lady bird bugs sunbathing on the beach. She continued to add as well some beach towels, the sea, the sun and umbrellas.
After a while I dropped out of the game, and Victoria continued to make her squiggle drawings, which allowed me to have some time to do other stuff.
Starting from a tangled line, Victoria first drew a bush full of red apples with a boy hiding behind it. The drawing also contains a sun, a mushroom house, and the house of a mole with everything a mole would need to live in comfort ;-). On the right, the same tangled line is transformed into the smoke coming out of a mushroom house. This time she drew a night scene including a sky full of stars and a bright moon!
Then I gave her 2 cards with a curved line and starting from this she drew an old lady with a stick on one, and a butterfly on the other.
Here we started from another curved line and she did a girl, a railroad and a boy.
Lukas (almost 4) also joined this game, but ended up exercising his drawing skills by drawing his own car on a piece of paper. In my opinion squiggle drawing is a great creative activity for kids who have already some drawing skills, so probably as of 5 years and up.
I first read about squiggle drawing here, and thought that it is a great way to stimulate creative thinking for my kids. And apparently I’m not the only one 🙂 as the technique is frequently used by teachers and by child psychologists for communication with kids .
Obviously, now I am a fan of squiggle drawing with kids. If you think this might be fun for your kids also, try it out. I’ll be curious to hear from you how it was.
Update: Have a look at something else we did with curved lines. Cool right?
