When a preschool teacher in Canada started an art project tied to her students’ learning unit, she had no idea it would wildly amuse the internet.
Briar Van Driel, 29, works as an early childhood education assistant in Nanaimo, British Columbia, and recently assigned her preschoolers a horse craft, because her classroom’s April theme was farming.
“We spent the month learning about what happens on a farm, what farmers do, what animals they take care of and the food they grow to help stock our grocery stores and feed us and our families,” Van Driel tells TODAY.com, adding that the horse craft was a great way to talk about the role of horses on a farm.
Van Driel says making a horse using construction paper and yarn was “a way for them to express their creativity” while learning.
“As an educator its so important that we give them the creative freedom and independence to do their art as they see fit (and) end up with a product that they are proud of that came from their own mind,” she says.
For the project, Van Driel created an example horse on her own, but tells TODAY.com the preschoolers did not see her version.
“They just had the verbal guidance that we were making a horse and got to look at a picture of a real horse,” she says. “They had full creative freedom to use the provided pieces in whatever way they desired on their papers.”
The end results — which Van Driel compiled in a now viral video on TikTok — will make you whinny with laughter.
“My preschoolers horse mane art,” Van Driel wrote across the opening of the video, which shows her example horse, complete with uniform yarn hair for the mane. “Except it gets progressively more abstract.”
The video, which follows a trend among teachers who show the before and afters of their students’ art on social media, has been viewed more than 2.7 million times and amassed more than 2,000 comments.
“The variety in the eye placement is 11/10,” one user wrote.
Another added, “Laughed the hardest at the one where the eyes were no where near the horse.”
“They all tried to show the horses from different angles,” one user noted.
Other fans of the video applauded Van Driel’s approach to creativity.
“I love that they were allowed to do THEIR interpretation,” one user wrote.
While the video is making adults laugh, Van Dreil tells TODAY.com that art projects are great for the kids, because they help to develop fine motor skills and she emphasizes “process over product” in her classroom.
“We provide general ideas and resources to them, but we never correct them or tell them where to place things,” she says. “This fosters so much confidence in the children, and gives them such an amazing sense of pride in their work. They learn to not doubt themselves, but rather take so much joy in what they can create.”
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