It is fascinating to watch my daughter while she creates. I love how she see things and it amazes me the details that she picks up at only 4 years old. She loves to prop things up on our coffee table and recreate them. Sometimes she draws them or sometimes she cuts out construction paper and assembles the pieces to form her project.
Last week, I did a little experiment. I put a still life on our dining room table and set out a bunch of supplies. I laid out paints, construction paper, scissors, glue, pencils, markers and clay.
I started to paint the fruit and asked her if she wanted to join me.
She sat down and declined the paint, but went straight for the construction paper. She cut out the shapes of the different fruits and their stems. She drew some of the fruits first and some she simply cut out.
She glued all of her pieces to another piece of paper to form her still life.
When she finished gluing, she used a marker to add a little life to her still. She gave all of the fruits faces and personalities and even made a cowgirl orange, complete with a lasso.
The next day, I invited my daughter to come and look at the still life of fruit. She sat on my lap and I asked her what she saw. She named off all the fruits on the cutting board. I asked her what color the pear was and she responded that it was green. I asked her if green was the only color that she saw and she looked closer and told me that she saw brown. When I asked her where she saw the brown, she started with the stem and then went into further detail about the speckles of brown around the pear, explaining that the speckles weren’t everywhere and showing me where they were more saturated. She went on to the next piece of fruit, which was the orange. She asked me about the little dimples all over the skin. She studied each piece of fruit and made wonderful observations about every piece.
She looked over the supplies on our table and reached for the clay. We used polymer clay, but play dough would be fine as well. She carefully sculpted each piece and laid out her fruit sculptures on a cutting board from her play kitchen.
I watched her intently as she used a straw from her juice to carve lines into her pumpkin.
When she sculpted her orange, she remembered her earlier observations and used a pencil to poke little dimples into it. She worked through each piece of fruit and even sculpted the red apple, which was no longer on our still because she ate it after making her construction paper project.
I was blown away by her clay sculpted still life. It came out so beautifully.
She loved it too. When she was finished, she grabbed a bowl out of play kitchen and cut up her fruit and made a fruit salad for the both of us to “eat”. 
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