Children’s workFrom the archive
Six pencils for six of us
After a family trip to the Night Safari in 2018, Nurin doodled what she saw, and drew our whole family as six pencils.
On 8 September 2018 we went to the Night Safari as a family. Nurin was twelve. She doodled her way through it, turning what she saw into pictures and meanings. All four of these sheets are hers.
Each of our children reflects in a different way. Some are more hands-on, some think things through out loud. Nurin is the one who doodles.
The Night Safari
On the first sheet she wrote "Night Safar 8 september 2018" and drew a bus with six faces in the windows labelled D, U, S, N, H and Q. Behind it is a trailer, and along the bottom are the animals: a lion, a cat and a striped animal.
Six pencils
The sheet we want you to look at is this one. Next to a bird on a branch and two winged girls, she drew six pencils standing in a row. The letters on them are D, U, S, N, H and Q: Daddy, Ummi, Syauqi, Nurin, Hilwaa and Qoyis. Each pencil has its own icon at the tip. There is a computer, a calculator, a pair of glasses, a heart, a smiley and a shape.
On the same sheet is a family tree of sorts, made of circles, squares and a triangle joined by lines, with an arrow shooting down through it. This one has a funny story. Nurin had picked up some of our psychology books that were lying around, instead of the children's books. She pondered the diagrams of genealogy, the circles, squares and triangles, without really understanding what they were about. Then she used them in her own doodle to show how the six of us are related.
Two more sheets
The other two sheets are a ninja with his weapons beside a large outline shape, and a winged girl floating over swirls.
What we take from it
To be honest, we still do not know what most of these doodles mean. What we do know is that we have a child who is actively thinking and writing down her thought process, in her own way. That is what Inspire and Integrate are about in the 4-I. Something on a trip or in a book starts a thought, and she works it into her own picture of her family and her world.
If your child doodles on outings, keep the sheets and date them.
