Drawing: my son hates it and - obviously - is very very bad at it.

[gordonpym]

Needless to say, I am not good at it myself, but this wasn't an issue with DS1 who really enjoyed it.
DS2 5y hates drawing, painting, coloring.., and at school the difference between his works and those of the other children is huge.
The fact is that a certain ability is required at school, and I don't know how to help him. Can you recommend any book or website with activities to print/copy or with ideas.
Many thanks in advance!!!

dd not only couldn't draw when small, she also wouldn't. For years when other children drew pictures, she made patterns with colours and refused to make any sort of representational drawing. It did cause something of a problem once she got to yr 1 and was expected to draw a picture & put words beneath it. She did come round to doing them in the end, IIRC (her teacher was much nicer about it than your ds's!)

Now (age 9) I would say her drawing and art skills generally are if anything better than the average, and she enjoys making pictures.

He is 5 yrs old! The range is huge at that age. Don't let him worry about it. He will do it in his own time. He maybe will never be any good good at drawing-lots of people (me included) are not. Just give him plenty of opportunities at home-make it fun-like someone does a squiggle and the other person turns it into a picture.

I think it is reasonable to pay attention to your son's drawing skills because the kind of shapes children create when drawing precede the kind of shapes they need to make to be able to make to write.

BUT...

Many, many children don't really develop these skills till they are closer to 8 than 5. I think the difficulty is that while there are plenty of children who would rather spend the years from 5-7 creating dens and burning off energy, there is also a large group of children who churn out drawings from a young age and are never happier than when they have a pencil in their hand. They are both learning necessary skills, but the second group of children are easier to handle in a classroom, and are developing skills that are easy to record and assess. ("Draw a picture of your holiday" is quite an easy instruction to give).

I think the thing to do is encourage your son at his own pace, encourage him to experiment with different media (pastels, paint, crayons, pencils, cutting), but don't be too focused on what he produces. I think it's worth talking to your son's teacher about where she stands on this - he needs to be helped along the developmental path that he is designed to follow, not criticised for being at a different point on that path to a random different child.

Looking back at DSs holiday book I can see a change in his drawing from eth day I "taught" him how to draw stick people. gradually he changed from bikes and empty swimming pools to " me and dad playing X" & " I like 10 pin bowling" He hadn't known HOW to put people in his pics before as he couldn't draw them as they really look.