The teachers at my school seem to think that the purpose of Arts & Crafts class is to make kids mass produce enough decorations to cover the walls of our classrooms thrice over. They pass out two or sometimes three copies of the same coloring page to each student and prod them along until each one is fully decorated. I’ve never heard kids put up such a fuss about coloring; they’d rather continue doing math work than be sent off to Arts & Crafts.

The other day, one of the teachers came into my classroom and handed me a stack of papers, each bearing the outlines of four flowers. She explained that we needed more decorations for the third floor, and even though the kids had colored at least 8 of these flowers each already, we needed another 8 from each of them. I gave her a funny look and told her that I’d do my best but I couldn’t promise I’d get a page from each kid, much less two.

Our school suffers from a serious flower deficiency

When I showed the kids the pages and asked them to color the flowers their responses ranged from groans to outright refusal. I felt so bad for them that I finally conceded that if they’d color just two flowers each, I’d color the other two flowers for them and we’d throw the other four in the trash.

Now, you’d think it would be easy to simulate the artistic style of a 6 year old, but you have to forget a lifetime of pesky adult coloring habits, like staying inside the lines and using colors actually found in a real flower. Some of the kids were much easier to emulate than others: for example for one little boy uses a style I’m going to call ‘the lazy rainbow’. You just grab, roughly, one of every color crayon and scribble in circles until… well, I’m honestly not sure… he always manages to stop at the point where it’s not quite finished, but close enough that nobody will call him out on it.

The most difficult style to fake was that of one artistic little girl who draws princesses on everything (this includes her desk, chair, books, arms, etc). If my flower didn’t have a princess on it, nobody would believe it was her work. I decided I had to use a bit of trickery here… I started coloring in some flower petals and then told her that I really wanted a princess on my flower but didn’t know how to draw one. Before I knew it she’d grabbed the crayons and not only drew a little Cinderella, clad in blue, but also finished off the rest of the flower in pink and rainbow colors.

Compare my flowers (top) to actual children's artwork (bottom)!

Now, I know I could just have forced them to color the flowers, or told the other teacher that they refused, but she’d only have forced it on them later and as much as these kids drive me crazy, it’s sad to watch the fun and creativity sucked out of something as simple as coloring.