Understanding Children’s Artistic Expression and Drawing Development
ITEM 10: Artistic Expression
What it is:
A form of communication and representation that uses a language allowing expression through control of plastic materials and techniques that enable the creative process.
Methods that Promote Creativity and Language as an Expression:
- Through a stimulus, have spontaneity, freedom, and flexibility.
- Put the child in contact with art from different periods.
- Avoid falling into stereotypes or models so that the child acquires self-assurance.
- Identify the rhythms of learning.
- Encourage observation, experimentation, senses, perception, curiosity, intuition, imagination, and safety.
- Evaluate the production of other children.
- Accept varied answers that are very different than expected.
- Promote the game and management of unstructured materials.
Evolution of Plastic Expression: Scribbling Development
There are different stages:
1. Scribbles Disorders:
Characterized by intentional strokes left, has no visual control over her hand, often looks the other way while painting. The lines vary in length and direction, often exceeding the limits of the paper, and making the tool in different ways, often putting too much pressure on the stand.
2. Scribbles Controls:
Characterized by: conducting his hand, looking at the surface he draws (visual-motor coordination), the pleasure of drawing. Interest is added to copy, repetition of strokes displayed: circular, cut lines, points… and controls the graphic spaces, but sometimes enthusiasm exceeds the limits of the paper.
3. Scribbles with Name:
Run closed shapes, usually circular and loose strokes associated with real objects, giving them an intentional name. There is a representative intention, but an adult cannot recognize the represented object. Sometimes the child announces what they will do before they begin and often changes its name while working or when done. Starts to use color.
Plastic Expression in the Curriculum
The ways in which fine arts and language manifest are related to the different abilities relating to the objectives of early childhood education. Global learning allows expressive activities to develop different aspects of the curriculum relating to the three types of content mentioned above. Examples:
1. Contents of Concepts:
Human body parts, feelings, perception of orientation in space and time, qualities of objects…
2. Contents of Proceedings:
Manual dexterity, observation and manipulation of materials and objects, experiment with the senses, using the expressive possibilities…
3. Contents of Activities:
Respect for own and others’ productions, taste for beauty, confidence in own possibilities, respect and care for the environment and the objects themselves and others.
Interpreting a Picture
Depending on the case:
1. Aggression:
Presence of prominent teeth, long arms with closed fists, finger claws.
2. Fear/Anxiety:
Reduced graphics, undecided, small, and simple in form. May be drawn into a place to provide shelter.
3. Obsessive:
Drawing is always in a very similar method, following the same routine, the same theme, or colors. It is an elaborate design that creates much anxiety for the child if they are wrong or think that it has not been done well. Often needs to erase. Highly repetitive simple lines can be associated with mental disabilities.
4. Insecurity:
Arms and small hands and/or affixed to the body. Thin legs or unstable. Stroke irregular, insecure, frequent failures with corrections. Figures compressed and small. Tilting the figure at 15 degrees or more.
5. Attention Deficit:
Drawing disorganized. Little definition, poor detail. Unreal objects or very distorted. The child will draw only items of interest and tend to occupy the entire space of the paper with few ill-disposed forms.
6. Lateralidad Cross:
The cross laterality is manifested by the presence of figures, letters, or numbers upside down (as reflected in a mirror). The line drawing is distorted, irregularly shaped.
7. Self-Esteem:
Good organization of space. Arms and hands open. Large size of the figure. The drawing usually takes almost all the space on the paper with proper distribution. Positive expression on their faces when they appear with several figures.
Functions of Drawing
In the scribble and drawing, the child develops fundamental aspects for development: The essential prerequisites of reading and writing, self-confidence, the experience of motivation inside; creativity. Drawing is a spontaneous motor activity, complex and increasingly networked, contributing to the formation of the personality, as does play. Drawing and scribbling, the child feels the joy of movement. To dominate the movement means to mature psychomotor, intellectually and emotionally. It is a means of interpersonal communication (involuntary and voluntary) and therefore a language (“hidden”, “silent”, “non-verbal”), the other language. It is a “therapy” that brilliantly meets the function of discharge and/or sublimation of aggression.
Evolving the Drawing Does the Child in:
- Fine motor
- Writing and reading
- Self-confidence motions
- Expression, feelings, and sensations
- Communication with others and himself
- Creative personality formation
- Psychological maturation