When I first came to New Zealand in 1998, my son attended a local kindergarten. The children learnt their alphabet through art activities chosen by the teachers: A for apple, B for ball, each one a product the adult had decided on. I saved every idea, thinking I was building a useful collection for when I worked with children myself.
After my son started school, I wanted to study further and gain some centre experience. I arrived at a centre where I was volunteering, armed with all my saved activity ideas, ready to offer them. But this centre was completely different. It was free play, where children led with paint, finger paint, and every other experience. I could not offer even one of my activities. When I talked to the Centre Manager about it, she handed me a book that changed the way I thought about children's art: Pennie Brownlee's Magic Places.
In it, Pennie describes what she calls the "adult-version cat" that gets copied everywhere: one circle for the head, another circle underneath for the body, a tail, and two ears on top. Every child ends up drawing the same cat. But the problem is deeper than sameness. Once a child learns this template, it replaces whatever rich, personal image they might have created from their own real experience of a cat. The template shuts down the creative process instead of opening it up.
That was the beginning of a shift in my thinking that has shaped everything we do at Our Kids.
My son won a class award in year 1 for "best artwork." It was based on what he had learnt from his kindergarten teachers. At the time, it seemed like a wonderful achievement.
But afterwards, he lost confidence in his own ability. He was into dinosaurs and kept saying "I can't do it" and wanted help. He set goals that he needed to improve in art. He had been trained to think there was a right way to draw, and his way did not measure up.
In year 6, a teacher who gave children enough time made a real difference, and his artwork started to improve. From year 7 at a new school, the teaching methods unlocked something. He received a most improved award and his art transformed. He transferred those skills to digital design, won a scholarship, and completed his entire degree without paying fees. Today he is creative across so many areas of his life.
The potential was always there. It just was not tapped into until much later, because template art in his early years had shut it down.
Over my years in ECE, I have seen many forms of adult-directed, product-focused art. Colouring-in sheets where children fill within the lines. Festival activities where the teacher chooses the product: pre-cut diyas for Diwali, or bells, baubles, and Christmas trees cut out by adults for children to decorate with colour and glitter. Hand and footprints pressed onto paper by a teacher for Mother's Day cards, then turned into a picture the adult has designed.
These activities have something in common. The adult chooses the product. The adult prepares the shapes. Every child's work looks the same. And the child's own experience, imagination, and creative voice are not part of the process.
Pennie Brownlee's work on creativity describes four stages: Experience, Focus, Creative Process, and Art Product. When a child has a real experience, they unconsciously download a whole sensory package: words, feelings, textures, smells. This gets stored in memory and later the child expresses it in their own way, through painting, dance, conversation, or imaginative play. When we hand a child a pre-cut shape and say "decorate this," we skip all of that. There is no experience behind it, no personal connection, no sensory memory being expressed.
Children go through a natural art development journey. After an extensive period of making marks and patterns, they begin to realise their marks can represent something. But at the symbol stage, roughly ages four to ten, children are not drawing what things look like. They are drawing what they know and what matters to them. Realism does not come until after age ten. When we give children templates and colouring-in sheets, we teach them that their own marks are not good enough, and we interrupt this natural progression.
In Magic Places, Pennie Brownlee offers clear guidelines that we use at Our Kids to protect and nurture children's creative development.
1. The child is the creator. We do not draw, make, or model for the child. If we create something with their materials, children will ask us to make one for them, and we end up doing the creating for them.
2. Stay in the scribbling stage when working alongside children. We can sit with children and enjoy the materials, experiment, and make patterns. But if we do not draw symbols or pictures, children will not ask us to draw one for them.
3. Children choose from their experience. We do not tell a child what to draw, make, or model. When children hit "the big blank" and say "I can't do it," we do not ask "what does the cat look like?" Instead, we say "tell me about the cat," helping them call up the full sensory memory of their experience.
4. The child's creative potential is protected. It is their great treasure. Colouring-in books, tracing, templates, picture stencils, and worksheets are what Pennie calls "fake creating and creativity theft."
When a child creates something, how we respond matters just as much as how we set up the experience. We want children's motivation to be intrinsic, coming from inside them, not driven by our praise or approval.
This means we avoid overdoing praise. Instead of "wow, that's amazing," we notice and invite. "That looks interesting, Jake. Would you like to tell me about your picture?" This respects the child's work and gives them the choice to share or not. Sometimes they will tell you everything. Sometimes they will not, and that is fine too.
This is also why observation is so important. One child at our centre painted the edges of the paper first, then made brush strokes up and down, like painting a wall. His father was a painter. You would not know that unless you watched closely. Children do not always explain what they are doing when asked. Close, quiet observation often tells us more than any question could.
The difference starts with consistency. When paint is offered every day, something changes. At one centre I visited, toddlers covered their hands with paint, and the response was to stop offering it. But toddlers are in a sensory stage. When paint is a novelty, of course they explore with their whole hands. At another centre where paint was available inside and outside almost daily, toddlers worked with full concentration, filling the paper. They had moved through the sensory stage because they had enough experience. If a new child covers their hands, the teacher works with that one child rather than removing paint from everyone.
At this same centre, a swan plant had grown big and cocoons were appearing everywhere. Tamariki could see the whole life cycle of a butterfly in their environment. I watched a toddler painting the life cycle, not because anyone asked them to, but because the experience was real and the resources were there.
Our blog articles on Diwali and Chinese New Year show what we mean by authentic festival experiences. Real diyas lit by doorways and windowsills, not pre-cut paper ones. Real rangoli drawn with coloured powder, with an Indian parent invited to demonstrate. Real red envelopes and lanterns for Chinese New Year, with children making their own dragons rather than following a template.
The Christmas tree at our centres went through its own transformation. We used to have pre-cut decorations that children filled in and hung up. After learning from Pennie Brownlee and Kimberley Crisp's work, we changed our approach. The adults decorated a beautiful tree, just as you would at home, with sensory elements like orange peels and cinnamon. The idea is simple: give children a real experience that makes an impression. Many of them are seeing decorated trees at home too, so the centre experience connects to something they already know. Children then had a small tree on the table with real decorations they could put on, pull off, and redecorate as many times as they wanted. Those who were inspired chose to do it. Those who were not, moved on. That is how authentic learning works.
For Mother's Day, instead of handprint cards, some of our teachers have made bath salts, kawakawa balm, or potted plants with the children. These are gifts where tamariki are genuinely involved in the process: measuring, mixing, planting, caring.
The same principle applies beyond art. Pennie Brownlee makes the point that when we provide pre-built houses and tents, "the brain grunt is gone." Children lose the opportunity to imagine, problem-solve, collaborate, and build something of their own. We supply the materials, and children do the thinking and creating. That is where the real learning happens.
At Our Kids, we have grown from one centre to five. As our organisation grows and new kaiako join our team, it is important that the thinking behind our practices does not get lost. This article is part of how we keep our philosophy grounded, alongside our professional development and internal resources. It is not about judging anyone who has done template art. I started my own journey collecting those exact activities. It is about understanding why we have moved away from them, and what we offer tamariki instead.
Reference: Pennie Brownlee, Magic Places (Good Egg Books, 2016).
