What do we learn from drawings of children?

 

Kids enjoy drawing. They experience the sheer joy of making marks at about the age of two. Some crayon, pencil or ink are picked up and they scribble.

With these scribbles, our toddlers are not trying to represent truth. It is simply a joyful discovery of the opportunity to make a lasting mark on the planet - their own new found strength.

The meaning of scribbling

The earlier straight-line scribbles become circular scribbles at around three or four years of age, and this is a very significant milestone. To build enclosed circle shapes, their broad, continuous, circular scribbled lines begin to link together.

The ability to draw an enclosed form marks the start of being able to depict the things around you in the universe. The beginning of being able to shape the letters of the alphabet is also marked.

Significance Making

Gradually, as adults throughout their lives look for messages in their marks, the scribbles move from simply becoming an inner visceral gratification for young children.

Circular forms, or the light, or trees, become heads. "Moms, dads, grandparents, careers give their scribbles meaning, "Is that mummy? "What a lovely tree!”

Their scribbles have now become identifiable as "things" to others through the encouraging discussions and modeling of adults. This is also an introduction to the nuanced and abstract notion that symbols of meaning are also written words.

Our kids are starting to realize the communicative power of making their mark.

The capacity to recognize a "inside" and a "outside" of those shapes is the next significant development. Dots become eyes and noses on the inside, lines shoot from the outside to become arms, legs, rays of the light, petals and stems. To refine their alphabet letter writing, these same abilities are needed.

The adults in their lives are delighted and those optimistic responses provide great encouragement to our children. Their sketches are celebrated, put up on childcare walls, popped on to fridge doors. And in this way, they draw and draw.

From the viewpoint of a four-year-old - what is not to like about drawing? It gives them tremendous inherent happiness, and it also seems to make their loved ones happy. Excluding, obviously, when he's on the wall of the bedroom... in biro...

Not all of the rainbows and roses are

A look around the country at refrigerator doors and you might be forgiven for assuming that scribbles are becoming an obsession with roses, suns, rainbows and pointy roofed buildings. They seem fixated on five-and six-year-olds.

These are all very easy shapes to draw, it turns out, and they represent schemes that are quite easily recognizable, ensuring you get a lot of kudos and praise from your audience. Easy Landscape Drawing them provides a lot of external appreciation and internal satisfaction.

But a closer look at five-, six- and seven-year-olds' drawings will show far more than sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. In their paintings, the proportion of the objects has nothing to do with real life.

On the page, items which make an impression on them loom big. Hence, in young children's sketches of themselves, belly buttons and eyelashes also appear prominently.

On a more sobering note, in the sketches of children in detention facilities, walls and barbed wire feature prominently.

When children begin to anchor their drawings on the paper, where their items had previously drifted randomly in space, another drawing milestone is achieved by around age seven.

They draw baselines and skylines, generally thin lines of green grass and blue sky, seeing the world around them as they attempt to represent it.

Source: The Soft Roots