Do you ever wonder what your child’s drawings are about?
Do you look at them and think they’re a bit messy? Do you wish she would draw something figurative?
My youngest is now four. Here is something she produced this week:
Figure 1
Hmm… Picasso? Miró?
Here’s another picture of hers, drawn on the same day, of the Big Bad Wolf outside Grandma’s cottage.
Figure 2
So she can draw! I don’t know about you, but I was starting to get worried.
But a day later, we were back to this…
Figure 3
What’s going on here? Why would a child who can clearly draw when she puts her mind to it, spend hours on seemingly meaningless scribbles?
The answer is that these scribbles have meaning after all.
If you’ve spent any time on the 100 Toys site, you’ve probably come across my article on schemas. As I explain in the post, schemas are mental models of things we have encountered in the real world.
Schemas are a kind of shortcut. They save us having to think about how to do something from scratch every time. They are a repeatable pattern we can rely on to complete a task.
If I decide to throw a ball, I know that it will go in the direction my arm moves. Over time I learn that it will arc up into the air and then come down. I learn that it will bounce and continue along in the same direction.
I don’t have to wonder which way it will travel. Through repeated experimentation, I already know.
My schema saves me from going back to first principles every time I encounter a challenge.
There are schemas for rotation, positioning, enveloping, orientation, and all kinds of other movements. We sometimes call them action schemas.
Schemas for drawing
But as well as understanding how things move, our children have to form mental models of how things look. They need schemas for form as well as function.
Toddlers explore ideas through movement, but by the time your child is a preschooler, she is starting to manipulate things in her mind. A toddler lines up blocks or builds towers in order to explore the idea of connecting; a preschooler thinks about how she can place those same blocks to represent a crocodile’s teeth or make an enclosure for her toy animals.
So, back to my daughter’s drawing.
Look again at the marks she made. Can you see any common patterns?
She is exploring how lines intersect. She could do this as easily with blocks or matchsticks but today she is using a pen.
She is developing graphic schemas. These help her make lines and curves and position elements on the page. At the moment my daughter is particularly interested in grids, enclosures and enveloping.
