I have a seven-year old boy who’s the best.

He does sometimes forget about boundaries. Other people’s. His own. I have tried my best to chat with him about these lovely boundaries and body awareness, but I have a feeling it will take years of repetition and learning for him to find his own balance in it all.

Ah, boundaries.

Speaking of boundaries and lines, I’ve been wanting to trace the kid’s bodies and get them to design the shape with drawn-on clothes and faces for a while now. I’ve seen it done in schools and the results are always beautiful and interesting. I’ve been carrying around a roll of white craft paper for just that purpose for a while now. I even packed it with us when we came to Newfoundland.

A while after seeing the idea I also read, in all my research about kids learning about personal space, about how doing body tracing like this can give children a sense of their own bodies in the world and help them become aware of how they might affect others. Seeing their bodies traced lets them see how much space they take up on the couch or the floor or the sidewalk. So not only was it a colourful looking art project for a stormy day, it was something that could also really help my kids with identity formation and body awareness.

Score.

So, the other day I finally hauled the roll of paper out. My four-year-old was the first one to try it and I’m not sure how she processed it, but it had a disorienting affect on me.

I wondered out loud, “Is that really how tall you are?”

“Look at how long you look on the floor!”

It was hard for me to grasp. The drawing does actually seem larger than the person, but they’re exactly the same size. Something about seeing my daughter’s double was disorienting.

She was very specific about the colours in her dress and the colour of her nails. My favourite part might be the one green hand.

A few days later, after the art had been hung up on the wall, my seven-year-old son decided he wanted to try. I went to the paper roll and realized I only had half of what was needed. He was disappointed, but then I suggested we experiment with different body shapes. That’s when he lay down like this:

I’m not sure how it affected him. But he said he had fun and it definitely gave us a different perspective on one another’s bodies and the space we live in.

I’ll have to do one next.