what is drawing anyway?

my students spend a lot of time listening on the first day of school so i like to save the listening i need them to do for another day and get them moving right away. but i want the first activity to set the tone for what's to come the rest of the term.

so i set up this still life and...

...i laid out these materials "buffet-style" and...i told them to make the most realistic drawing they could of the set-up using only the materials provided.

four students quickly went to the ink and used the wooden skewers or the q-tips to draw with it. but most of the class went to the string, the fabric, the clay. one student even built a three-dimensional replica of the set-up which...fell apart the minute he tried to move it.

here are some of the finished products.

when they finished we gathered round and looked at the work. i asked them to talk about similarities and differences they saw in the people's approaches to the problem. here are the lists we made.

then i asked them if everything we were looking at was truly drawing. they said of course not. so we started to talk about what WAS drawing and what was NOT drawing. these are the lists we made.

i'm looking forward to coming back to these lists at different points over the course of the term to see if their thinking has shifted at all.