My favourite kids' drawing... that broke my heart

And what it reveals about our broken idea of learning

Dear friends,

I feel confident in presuming that you all know how to spell ‘squirrel’. Even more confident in thinking you know how to spell ‘fox’.

Regardless of how good your spelling is, I sincerely hope your confidence in how a word is spelled doesn’t limit your confidence in drawing the object.

Art is creative. It doesn’t limit. It allows us to play, unattached to crude, reductive measures of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. (Unless it’s botanical illustration, of course.) That’s what makes art so freeing, such a wondrously unhindered act—it allows us to attempt to capture what it means to experience our world as a human being.

Of course, there are some things that every artist struggles to draw and maybe tries to avoid. (For me, it’s always noses.) But we can practice. I know I certainly don’t feel limited in attempting to draw a nose by the accuracy of my knowledge of noses. It’s merely that I want them to look nice.

I wish the same for you in drawing squirrels and foxes, regardless of your spelling ability.

I’ve looked at a lot of kids’ drawings of nature over the last seven years, over a thousand. For one particular piece of research, though, I examined 676 of them, all done for me by children aged 7-11 years old. In contrast to when I watched 105 nature documentaries in a row (for research purposes—I hadn’t gone mad), these drawings never failed to make me smile, no matter how many I looked at. They are so rich, and there are always fascinating, heartbreaking and heartwarming things in there to unpick.

Let me show you my favourite drawing of the lot. I’ll give you a moment to take it in.

I’m guessing you laughed. I did.

A comment I often hear when people look at this is some version of ‘That kid’s going places.’

It’s true. I wish I had that level of flexibility and strength to pivot when something isn’t working. Admirable.

But, the more I’ve pondered the thought process that went on here, the less funny I find it.

The instruction I gave them was ‘Please draw and label a picture of your garden or local park showing the animals you think live there. Tell us a little bit about what you have drawn below.’

I wasn’t their teacher. They knew I wasn’t going to mark it. But yet this child, rather than hand me something with an incorrect spelling, thought they’d be better off adjusting what they actually wanted to draw. I don’t think I can imagine a more damning symbol of our education system.

Sadly, I think we’re right. That kid is going places. But they’re going places in a society that prioritises grades over playfulness, over actual learning. Of course, I get that children need to learn how to spell, but it is very sad that this child’s expectation, one they learned through going to school, is that correct spelling matters over creativity, over the actual essence of what they are working on.

I get it. ‘Squirrel’ is a ludicrously spelled word when you think about it. In fact, of these 676 drawings, 183 contained squirrels via a total of 50 different spellings. I challenge you to come up with 50 different ways of spelling ‘squirrel’.

My point here is that, although 49 of these spellings are ‘wrong’, it is blindingly obvious that they all mean ‘squirrel’. And aren’t words simply a medium to convey a meaning?

A piechart representing the 50 different ways children spelled ‘squirrel’. After each spelling, the number shows how many times it was used.

When I published a paper based on analysing some of these children’s drawings, I had to negotiate a fair few reviewers’ comments querying how confident I was in identifying what the children had drawn. This is fair enough—it’s important to check the methods of a paper before it’s published. That’s what peer review is for.

In reality, this led to me crafting the below ‘scientific speak’ version of what I had done:

Where a term was misspelled or hard to read, we marked it as present only if it was independently interpreted in the same way by a second member of the research team.

Where a drawing was not labelled, but the broad identity of the animal or plant was clear after independent agreement by a second researcher, we marked the most specific term possible as present (e.g., where a tree or flower was drawn but not labelled, ‘tree’ or ‘flower’ was marked as present).

Where an unlabelled drawing had an unambiguous, diagnostic detail (e.g., a bird was drawn with a brown body and red breast, or an invertebrate was drawn with eight legs or dangling from a web), we afforded it a greater level of taxonomic identification (e.g., ‘robin’ rather than ‘bird’, or ‘spider’ rather than ‘minibeast’), again following independent agreement by a second researcher, and marked this term as present.

I can’t help but laugh at this. ‘Following independent agreement by a second researcher’ sounds official. What it means in practice is that I would be sitting in our open-plan office, ploughing through the drawings. I would come across one that I was quite sure was a particular thing, but the label was difficult to read or not there, so I would pass it to a friend and say ‘What do you think that is?’ If they said the same thing as me, which, honestly, they always did, it got recorded as that thing.

What I’m saying is that we should give kids way more credit.

Believe it or not, this is not a child’s drawing. It is mine.

Just because they can’t spell something the way it’s printed in the Oxford English Dictionary or their drawing doesn’t look exactly like something from a field guide, it is, 99% of the time, quite clear what they have drawn.

And this is testament to just how much attention they pay to the natural world around them.

It feels like when your cat has been asking you for food for an hour and you aren’t giving in. You can’t help but feel they think you’re an idiot for not understanding what they’re asking for.

I feel the same way about children and these drawings. If they saw the lengths I had to go to justify identifying a drawing of a squirrel as a squirrel, when it is quite blatantly a squirrel, they could be forgiven for thinking that adults are not really that smart after all.

I understand the convoluted scientific process this is a part of and why it matters. But I think, sometimes, we adults need to get off our high horses and meet children where they’re at. We do like to complicate things, us adults. Often, the truth is actually quite simple.

I’m reminded of the number of times children and young people have spoken on environmental issues. Their pure, unclouded mindset always cuts right to the heart of the issue in a way that adults rarely do.

If we want to solve climate change, we need to stop using fossil fuels.

If we want to reduce pollution, we need to stop consuming stuff, being wasteful and wanting more than we need.

If we want to save nature, we need to stop destroying it.

As adults, we don’t want to believe it’s this simple. We give so much weight to the complexities of the adult world we’ve conjured up because enmeshed in this adult world are our jobs, our livelihoods, our purpose. If we admit that we could do without most of it, what do we do with ourselves?

I guess, the reason this drawing makes me so sad, despite being my favourite, is that I do wish this approach didn’t get this kid places. I hope, next time, they’re able to write an incorrect spelling on something without caring, without sacrificing the essence of what they’re doing. I hope the kids who wrote ‘skriwol’ or ‘squirl’ or ‘scrirrel’ get to go places too.

My other favourite drawing, which gives me slightly more hope, is this one.

I like it because of the conviction this kid clearly has. They’ve been taught to spell words out phonetically, so they have. And by this method, ‘hedgehog’ should obviously be spelled ‘headchog’. They knew it didn’t look quite right, so they tried it again. And then they trusted themselves.

I knew exactly what they meant, because look at that drawing. This child has spent time looking at a hedgehog, and they know what one looks like. And that’s what matters.

What stories do you have of children and their artwork? I’d love to hear.

Instead of our usual Nature In Your Corner this week, I’d like to highlight the work of children’s book author and illustrator Siski Kalla.

I came across Siski and her work very recently here on Substack. She was kind enough to share with me three of her children’s books: Let’s Explore Snails, Let’s Explore Moths and Let’s Explore Ducks, all in her ‘Urban Wildlife Explorer’ series. The artwork is just beautiful, and the quality of information included is fantastic!

Please do take a look at her website, where you can buy her books:

I am keen to help Siski get these books out to more kids any way I can, so if you know of any bookshops who are open to stocking self-published, small print runs, please do get in touch.

If you enjoy this newsletter each week, subscribe for free or upgrade to paid today:

Alternatively, you can…