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A child said, “Look, she’s drawing on the table!” I noticed she was in fact drawing on the table. I also noticed she was not drawing on the table in a destructive way but she was drawing on the table in a figuring something out kind of way. She drew the colors of the rainbow on one side out of order and on the other in order. 

I looked. I peered over. I knelt down and asked her why. She said, “I’m trying to figure out the pattern of the rainbow. The order of it.” I smiled. I said, “Artists do that. Some need to visually see it and play around with the color. Next time use scraps of paper to experiment with color. I handed her some paper and she started drawing and drawing lines and lines as she sorted out and ordered the colors of the rainbow line by line. All on her own initiative.

After she drew arches and created each part of the rainbow from red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. 

She smiled. She took out tape and hung up her rainbow. 

The process was amazing. I was a fly on the wall for a moment. 

Look at what happens when we simply don’t say “Don’t draw on the table!” Look what happens when we ask higher level thinking questions and wonder with children. Amazing work and “play” happens creatively, constructively coming from the child’s own being. 

Beautiful. In the words of Langston Hughes “It’s beautiful and ugly too.” The process. When we give space, time and a lot of understanding — a lot of magic happens.