13/07/2025
“Real learning leaves room for mistakes, surprise, and difference.“
If Every Piece Looks the Same, It Wasn’t Theirs to Begin With.
Walk into many early childhood classrooms and you’ll see a familiar sight... rows of identical art projects. Twenty penguins with the same cotton-ball belly. Twenty suns with exactly eight rays. Twenty perfectly traced rainbows in the exact same color order.
To an untrained eye, this may look like success. But what it actually reveals is that every child followed the same adult-led instructions to reach a pre-determined outcome (And let's not forget how much work the adult did compared to the child).
That isn’t creativity. That’s compliance.
When we give children a model and ask them to copy it step-by-step, the thinking has already been done for them. There is no real decision-making, no problem-solving, and no opportunity to explore. The child’s job becomes ex*****on instead of expression.
Now picture a different approach... Children are offered the same materials (paper, scissors, paint, etc) but no final example to replicate. One child makes a swirling abstract pattern. Another creates something that looks like a face. A third mixes colors just to see what happens. Every piece is different because every child brought their own ideas, choices, and perspective into the process.
That is what learning looks like.
Children are already spending much of their day following directions—cleaning up, lining up, washing hands, transitioning between activities. Instruction has its place, but if we want children to become thinkers, they need consistent opportunities to make decisions. And the only way to learn how to make decisions is by making them.
Open-ended art is one of the most powerful ways to support that growth. It invites experimentation, risk-taking, and reflection. It allows children to try, revise, and discover what works for them. When every piece looks the same, what we’re really displaying isn’t the child’s work. It’s ours.
Real learning leaves room for mistakes, surprise, and difference. If the walls are full of matching projects, we’re not celebrating creativity. We’re replacing it.
