Trynica's New Thing

Does every 4 1/2 year old spend hours a day coloring? It seems like there are several who do, but maybe not all of them? I don't know, but Trynica definitely does. We gave her 3 coloring books for Christmas and they are all colored through. Steve also found an empty artist sketch book laying around the house and every page of it has been drawn on, I think he found it about two weeks ago. In the last week she has also gone through almost an entire package of construction paper.

Her coloring techniques are so interesting to me. There was a stage for awhile where she had to have all of the markers lined up on the table and she would only use whatever color was at the top of the line. She would color one little thing, and then put that color at the end of the line and not use it until that color came up to the top of the line again. We have moved past that to just having all the markers in a container now.

She colors really well within the lines, but pays absolutely no attention to what color goes where. This means that people have purple skin, green hair, blue hands, and yellow feet. One of her new things is coloring one thing, like a ball, several different colors. She totally knows she is doing it too. If I color with her she will ask me to color the princesses hair purple, like she has a whole plan for the picture - only her plan doesn't make sense to anybody else but her. It's very creative, but very confusing.

She also loves to just draw and will draw very detailed pictures with very specific explanations of what is what, even if I can't tell what the picture means at all. She also likes to write her name on every picture she draws because she has recently learned to write her entire name. She can also spell and read other words by sounding them out.

Smart kid.