Drawing

This week, I have chosen to write about how children use drawing to express themselves. Drawing is a powerful means of communication that children use for different purposes. For example, children might draw to recount, brainstorm, explain, relax, imagine...  

Children can show individual expression and creativity through their drawings. 

Drawings reveal how children view and perceive the world. They can evidence a child's thinking, explanations and theories about different phenomena. When talking about their drawings, children reveal understandings, awareness, vocabulary, misconceptions, partial truths, over-generalisations and confusion. 

Drawings can capture and sequence events as a child retells or creates a story. These drawings can then act as prompts for oral and written language. 

Drawings show children's interests and passions. 

Drawings are a way to record and retrieve memories. 

Sharing drawings gives children the opportunity to communicate, listen to others, ask questions and engage in dialogue.

Drawing helps to develop children's fine motor skills. 

Drawing provides opportunities for children to experiment with big ideas such as shape, line, size, pattern, distance and proportion. 

Drawing can help to develop children's ability to observe closely and pay attention to detail. 

Drawing can be challenging, so it gives children opportunities to develop patience, persistence, resilience and commitment. 

I just finished reading "Engaging Children's Minds" and these two quotes stood out for me, highlighting learning as a process and having children actively involved in recognising shifts in their own thinking and abilities. 

"Drawing involves a kind of problem solving, as the three dimensions of the reality of a car, a dog... are reduced to two dimensions on the flatness of the paper."

"Drawings can be also be revisited, modified, elaborated and labelled. This process of revisiting is a reflective one, helping to make the experience memorable and deepen the learning. It also encourages children to try to draw an object on several occasions and work on improvements to their final product."

The text offers strategies to embed a culture of drawing with young children:

- Model by drawing yourself

- Use drawings and illustrations as visuals so there is a shared language to talk about drawing

- Value drawing like reading. and encourage reluctant or less-confident drawers through scaffolding

- Build a drawing community so children feel safe and free to make tentative and repeated attempts

- Develop a classroom environment with space, time and resources (eg. interesting objects and mark-making tools)

This week, I was working with Early Years teachers in Switzerland. They were asked to draw a moment from their holidays that included the curved line above. They then shared their drawings with one another, using the visual to convey the events, people and emotions of a moment on holiday. Amazing to see the power of drawing for adults, too!

Here is a range of their drawings:

What opportunities do your children have to draw?

How often do children in your class draw?

Thinking about your role as a teacher, what might you do to encourage more children to draw more often?