Compares a child's drawings at home with the child's drawings at school. Concludes that children can activate meaning in a different way at home than at school. Suggests that transforming artifacts across sites may be something children do that often goes undocumented. (SG)

Studied gender differences in drawings by 261 elementary school children responding to projective drawing task. Findings support assumption that children who respond to projective drawing tasks tend to identify themselves with principal subjects of their drawings. Most subjects drew pictures about subjects same gender as themselves. (Author/NB)

A study was undertaken to determine how children of different ages used drawing to present an atypical situation, to what extent children's responses were governed by their increasing cognitive competence, and to what extent children's responses reflected an increasingly articulate grasp of the medium itself. A total of 137 children in…

Too much stress on technical procedure in a ceramics class can inhibit elementary students' free inquiry. It should be remembered that ceramics is a form of visual art and that art is a form of expression. Teachers must help students express themselves. (RM)

Creating a collage can be an effective way to help elementary children develop good compositional habits, drawing skills, and confidence. Students first gather pictures and photographs and create a collage. They then create a work of art from the collage, by drawing and painting it. (RM)

Techniques are presented to get children thinking about their body motions, thereby increasing the expressiveness of their drawings. (RM)

Third in the Mighty Easy Motivators series, this book is a hands-on guide to crafts for pre-school and grade school children to engage in during the literature program, after-school activities, or playtime. The programs in the book meet two objectives: introducing children to exciting new stories and poems and helping them create a story-related…

Current beliefs about how children draw emphasize the importance of drawing from memory, rather than from observation. However, an experiment with children aged seven to nine showed that observation drawings included greater detail and complexity. More research on observation drawing is recommended. (IS)

The authors suggest using graphic dialog--an adult and child drawing together and discussing their work--as a way of developing children's graphic skill. They illustrate the procedure through case studies and note that graphic dialogs between two children can also be effective. (SJL)

Sixty-six first-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children were tested for their sensitivity to the dimensions of syntactic repleteness (e.g., line variation) and expression (i.e., the feelings conveyed by a work). (Author/MP)

This study of the drawings produced by 34 autistic and 33 normal children (age 68-211 months) at the same developmental level found no intergroup differences on fragmentation of geometric design drawings, but significant differences in geometric design overlap and human figure overlap and fragmentation. (JDD)

Offers an interpretive frame for viewing children's growth as creators of imaginative worlds. Suggests that writing development depends not only on children's discovery of cognitive and linguistic strategies but on children's discovery that writing can help authors create coherence in their worlds beyond texts. (MS)

Explores the reasons art teaching practices developed by Pestalozzi and Froebel in the 1800's continue to influence contemporary schools, especially at the kindergarten and primary grades. Argues that 19th century school art coexists in contemporary North American elementary schools with school art forms originated by Cizek because each represents…

Investigated effects of varying doses of psychostimulant medications on expressive qualities evident in children's art products. Findings from eight children affected by attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder indicated that specific areas assessed were influenced by varying doses of medications. Data from art corresponded in positive manner to…

Describes the "Private Eye Project" developed by Seattle artist and writer Kerry Ruef and piloted by the Seattle Public Schools. Program materials include a loupe (a jeweler's magnifying glass) and a kit of specimens. Transformed by the loupe, the most ordinary objects present new, analogous worlds leading to poetic and artistic…