The purpose of this paper is to identify the developmental stages and feelings that children are portraying in their artwork. Included in the paper the writer gives examples of the different stages of scribbling and an activity for teachers and parents to do with the child. The results of the activities will give insight into a child's feelings…

Current English curriculum documents, namely the "Practice Guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage" and "Key Stage 1 of the National Curriculum," contain mixed messages about the role and value of drawing in early education. The documents state that children should be encouraged to explore their ideas, feelings and…

Including children as research participants is an important new direction in early childhood research. However, it is rare for such studies to include the voices of children with significant communication impairment. This article suggests that drawing may be an appropriate non-verbal method for "listening" to these children's ideas and recording…

Drawings are often used to obtain an idea of children's conceptions. Doing so takes for granted an unambiguous relation between conceptions and their representations in drawings. This study was undertaken to gain knowledge of the relation between children's conceptions and their representation of these conceptions in drawings. A theory of…

Young children are experts at make-believe and delight in listening to tales of fantasy and wonder. When the author learned that the second-grade students in her school were studying fairy tales and legends, she took advantage of their natural interests and classroom experiences and introduced them to the magical, dreamlike paintings of Swiss…

This article is a practitioner's attempt to resist habitual ways of interpreting and responding to young children's drawings. Early art education as a discipline is shot through with complexities, including wider shifting social discourses. This article specifically explores the continuing and powerful effect that Piaget's developmental approach…

From a sociocultural approach to literacy, young children, including culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children, can be viewed as active meaning-makers through participation in everyday literacy practices. This theoretical emphasis on the importance of the social context requires teachers and caregivers not only to improve and co-create…

Young children find meaning in the drawings they create that may not be apparent to an adult observer. The purpose of this study is to access the children's views using a drawing change task. Seventy-three pre-schoolers were asked to draw a person and then draw a person with a belly button. It was anticipated that tadpole (no separate body)…

The purpose of this study was to investigate methods of enhancing kindergarteners' artistic creative thinking and expressive drawing through an activity that involved appreciation of picture books. The study was conducted in a public kindergarten in southern Taiwan, with 27 children aged between 4 and 5. The researcher conducted the study in 16…

Researchers who deal with inclusive education have made great efforts to listen to the voices of children in order to understand marginalization. Despite the fact that these efforts take place, the voices of many children fail to be heard and hence many children continue to be marginalized. In this article we will develop and implement a technique…

In this decade of Education for Sustainable Development, it is timely to consider the methodological issues associated with researching this topic not only with adults but also with the young children who, as members of the next generation, will experience the success or otherwise of current environmental sustainability efforts. We argue that it…

This article reports on some of the findings of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project that looks at the mark-making of children under three years old. The data were all collected in the children's homes, and multimodal transcription and analyses were used. The project focused on an investigation of the principles that…

All too frequently the process of starting school is viewed through the eyes of teachers and parents alone. What is often overlooked is that the children, who live this experience, and their interpretation of events, may be vastly different from that of their parents and teachers. The use of drawings in conjunction with oral retellings is an…

The literature was reviewed and summarized to provide common interpretations of human figure drawings. Basic guidelines for interpreting human figure drawings (i.e., face and head, body, arms and hands, and legs and feet) are presented. Expectations for students at different developmental levels (ages 1 1/2 through adolescence) are identified, and…

This study investigates learning outcomes of four-year-old children at a preschool in P. R. China. The children are educated in a school ecology designed to address cognitive, social, linguistic and psychological development, where an instructional technique, "Integrating Thinking, Art and Language" (ITAL), is applied to support them in…