If you come to my house these days, the table—or floor—might reveal lots of itty pieces of paper, which were cut by little four-year-old hands, hands that love to hold scissors.
Rather than feel at all frustrated by the mess or judgmental—in a kind of that’s not real art way—I can’t help but enjoy the confetti-like cuteness of my smallest person mastering a new skill, and her incredibly high level of engagement with the task.
In fact, she is, these days, a fine motor skills-developing queen.
She’s completely into stickers.
And scribbles.
Also, “making letters” (although, really, she can only make ‘A’).
It’s not at all surprising then that I gravitated toward the idea of paper punching—or hole punchers in old-school vernacular. You can get them in many more shapes than a small and circular one these days. I was reminded of this through the studio blog for the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (shy of a visit to Amherst, Massachusetts, this is the next-best thing to playing there). I’m not quite sure my little gal is quite up to the challenge yet, but the reminder—holes in the form of circles or hearts or stars—is on our tiny paper horizon.
Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser is a writer, whose work appears in the ebook anthology Welcome to My World, Brain Child Magazine & the Huffington Post, Babble & Bamboo Magazine amongst others. She does some blogging for Teen Life and keeps her own blog—Standing in the Shadows—at the Valley Advocate. She and her dear husband are raising four children and enduring a great deal of chaos in the relatively sleepless process.