process vs. product

A few weeks (or more) ago, when we were drowning in apples, I thought it would a fun idea for the kids to make apple prints (and perhaps do some other apple-related activities, like these). Of course, right off the bat, Sir I. declared complete disinterest. So I set Miss M. up with apples, paper and paint. She made some nice prints, but I was busy peeling apples for an apple crisp and didn’t get the paper away from her in time. She got her fingers into the paint, smeared them all around, and instead of apple art, we got this:

This seems to happen to a lot of the kids’ art work. After we watched a performance of Harold and the Purple Crayon, I taped two long panels of white paper on a wall and let the kids loose with purple crayons. At first, they confined themselves to scenes from the Harold stories—a thing one sees in the dark, Mars, an apple tree guarded by a fierce dragon, a nice simple picnic lunch with nine kinds of pie–but then someone got the brilliant idea of creating purple lightning and purple rain all over everything. After the smoke cleared from the artistic frenzy, the paper had been colored over, ripped from the wall and into tiny shreds and  crumpled up by two maniacal little kids. They had a ball with it.

So. It’s obviously about the process, not the product.

Or at least, not the product I’d envisioned. Because we actually did end up with apple art:

… and wads of crumpled purple-scribbled paper.