Coloring!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we've been trying to get Erik to color without much success. He still likes to eat everything he touches, so I was hesitant to put him in his high-chair for our coloring attempts. Instead, I would tape a piece of paper to the tile floor and try to get him to color like that. We made sure that we had crayons that were big enough for him to hold easily. The smaller standard sized crayon require too much dexterity for a child of this age, so make sure you have longer chunkier ones that are easy to hold and maneuver. 

One afternoon Erik was standing next to the couch playing with things he was pulling out of Daddy's backpack. I watched him pick up a pencil and drag it across the couch as if he were coloring, and it hit me that the only thing stopping our coloring success was the angle we were trying to color at. To color on the floor made it harder to control the crayon, and the angle made it so he really couldn't see what was happening on the paper. So, we took a cookie sheet, taped our paper to the bottom, and put it on the couch with Erik standing next to it.

  I gave him the crayons and did one small line to show him what to do. His eyes instantly lit up, and he took off. He colored and pounded on the paper for several minutes, creating his first ever piece of art.