And before drawing, your child made enclosures with blocks and ran round in circles. All these letters contain closed off space of some kind: a, b, d, e, g, o, p, q, A, B, D, O, P, Q.Īgain, it’s clear that drawing leads directly to letter formation. The idea is the same.Įnclosing is also useful when writing. We can enclose toy animals with a fence, join hands to enclose a friend within a ring or draw a circle around marks on a page. All she cares about is the opportunity to enclose something.Įnclosing is yet another action schema which, as you can see, can also be represented graphically. In Figure 3, there’s a shape containing some dots, and a second one containing a cross. She has modified her schema for drawing triangles, and over the coming days I now expect her to produce a variety of pictures featuring zig-zags and triangles: Dragons’ teeth, dinosaurs’ spikes, stairs and houses with pitched roofs. The triangular ones she’d been trying to recreate. We had been practising zig-zags (you can see them showing faintly through from the other side of the paper) and they reminded her of something: The Big Bad Wolf’s ears. Mastering the diagonal line leads to triangles, zig-zags and the letters Z, X, V, M, N, Y, W and K.ĮDIT: Just before publishing this article, my daughter drew another picture. Early attempts look like squares with sloping sides:įirst you have to practise zig-zags, which are really just ‘open continuous triangles’:Īs we saw above, horizontals and verticals lead to letter formation. It’s hard to go up to a point and then come back down at exactly the same angle and using a line of exactly the same length. Once you can draw a grid, squares are straightforward, but three-sided shapes are much harder. I’d already suspected as much but it was interesting that she knew that about herself. Tell me why you chose to draw them like that.ĭaughter: Because I can’t draw triangles. And the house would have had a pitched roof. If I’d asked my six-year-old to draw him, she would have given him pointed ears and jagged teeth. Just because your child can draw a grid, it doesn’t mean she is ready to form the other letters. The following letters all just combinations of these two lines: Diagonals are hard ![]() Once you can organise lines in this way, the world of letter formation opens up for you. At the moment my daughter is particularly interested in grids, enclosures and enveloping.Ī year ago she was interested in horizontal and vertical lines but now she is learning to co-ordinate the two to make grids. These help her make lines and curves and position elements on the page. She could do this as easily with blocks or matchsticks but today she is using a pen. 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. Toddlers explore ideas through movement, but by the time your child is a preschooler, she is starting to manipulate things in her mind. They need schemas for form as well as function. Schemas for drawingīut as well as understanding how things move, our children have to form mental models of how things look. There are schemas for rotation, positioning, enveloping, orientation, and all kinds of other movements. My schema saves me from going back to first principles every time I encounter a challenge. Through repeated experimentation, I already know. I don’t have to wonder which way it will travel. I learn that it will bounce and continue along in the same direction. Over time I learn that it will arc up into the air and then come down. If I decide to throw a ball, I know that it will go in the direction my arm moves. They are a repeatable pattern we can rely on to complete a task. They save us having to think about how to do something from scratch every time. As I explain in the post, schemas are mental models of things we have encountered in the real world. If you’ve spent any time on the 100 Toys site, you’ve probably come across my article on schemas. The answer is that these scribbles have meaning after all. 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? ![]() ![]() So she can draw! I don’t know about you, but I was starting to get worried. ![]() Here’s another picture of hers, drawn on the same day, of the Big Bad Wolf outside Grandma’s cottage. Here is something she produced this week: All you need is a basic grasp of graphic schemas. Happily, understanding children’s drawings is easy. Do you ever wonder what your child’s drawings are about?ĭo you look at them and think they’re a bit messy? Do you wish she would draw something figurative?
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