12/15/2025
I am seeing more and more things like this in kindergarten/reception/prep/foundations and even preschool classrooms. It makes me want to scream. Can we just NOT? Can we just let children who are five (or four or three) be five (or four or three!!), please???
Some kids color outside the lines because they are still developing fine motor control. Because they are five. Assigning a grade, a value, a worth to their work because they are still developing fine motor control is such an absolutely needless thing to do.
Some kids color outside the lines because they just straight up don’t care about coloring and are being required to do worksheets they don’t care about. Assigning “stars” to it to try to falsely motivate them is setting them up for a system where they depend on extrinsic rewards or fear of missing out in order to power through doing things they don’t like. But why would we need to impose this on a small child for something that is objectively not only non-essential but truly unimportant? Why spend the relationship capital that it takes on whether or not someone has colored over a line when they are a small child and still developing fine motor control?
Maybe adults think that they’re causing learning to happen in children when they do this. Maybe the thought process is that children don’t know how to color and so we are teaching them to color.
But like…why? For what purpose? When is coloring so important that it would need to be rushed along?
For all my frustration with forced handwriting and skipping the natural development of handwriting, I do at least understand WHY it is important to adults. I can’t for the life of me understand why adults would feel freaked out by kids’ coloring and feel the need to rush them along in how “well” they do at it (except that adults seem to believe that children won’t learn *anything* unless they’re overtly, adultly, “taught”).
Don’t even get me started on “use the right colors” or “use colors that make sense”. What on earth is the purpose of art if not to play with color??
I had an art teacher in 3rd grade who, for reasons unknown to me at the time or now, seemed to inexplicably really dislike me. I don’t know if it was me personally or if she disliked everybody. At the time it felt personal but I can’t trust every thought I had when I was eight. Anyway, we did an art class project where we all had to draw a house according to her exact specifications and teaching. She told us exactly what lines to draw where and what colors to use to create this generic house drawing and ostensibly teach us about perspective and angles and stuff.
The only thing she didn’t instruct us exactly about was the color of the front door of the house; she said “color it whatever door color you want.” I colored mine turquoise with a purple trim and to this day I can remember how mad she got. She was like “I said whatever DOOR COLOR you wanted. Doors are colors like black or dark blue. Nobody’s house has this door color!” and my main coping mechanism at the time was just to cry, so all I did in return was cry, but I also secretly vowed that I would grow up and paint my door turquoise with purple trim.
(I did not actually do that but I am ranting about it on the internet which is the next best thing.)
So what the heck would be up with telling kindergarteners and preschoolers that they can’t just color things whatever color they feel like?! If a kid drew me a purple sun or a purple tree you know what I would say? “Oooh, a sun!” or “Oooh, a tree!” And that’s about it! Why on earth would I be bothered about whether or not it’s the color the thing is in reality? If I want to look at realism in art I will probably go to an art gallery and not a kindergarten class!
And this is all assuming that we’re even starting with coloring sheets which is a big assumption because I’d say coloring sheets are almost entirely useless* anyway and push for process art rather than product art…
That’s probably a post for another time. (Or search the term process art on my page.)
I find it really hard to believe that the purpose of this has to do with fine motor skills or coloring or art at all. It seems more likely to me that it’s developed in order to try to find reasons to introduce very young children to the concept of being graded for their work, to the idea that there is One Right Way to do things and that it’s the adult’s way, the way that everybody sees as “correct”, and that there’s a standard they must live up to. Even in something that’s supposed to be as joyous and life-giving as art. And that is soul-sucking to me.
*unless the kid themselves has requested or chosen them. But even then…someone had to tell them that coloring sheets existed. Why not let them live in a world of creating their own art for the delightful sake of creation for as long as possible?
Anyway. Zero stars here given to the concept of “three star coloring”.
[image description: a screenshot from a Google search for "three star coloring" because there were appallingly many examples of this type of controlling worksheet where the very youngest children of compulsory school age are graded according to three coloring criteria: color in the lines, fill in all the white space, and colors “make sense”. There are 4 different examples visible in the screenshot but they all have the same rules. End description.]
