Minor/Major: Children's Drawings - Relations Between Scale and Importance

Development

Stages of development start when a child reaches the age of four and continues to progress to each stage every two year till the age of ten. These stages are the following:

1. Preaxial Schema (4 years). The child represents the component shapes of an object, and the locations of objects within a rectangular field.

2.Uniaxial Schema (6 years). The child can specify an object's internal shapes and spatial relations, and its location relative to the edge of the field. For example, the relative heights of people a shown from the same baseline.

3.Biaxial Schema (8 years). The child mentally sets up two separate location fields within the main field - usually as foreground and background, and so uses two separate reference lines for heights etc.

4. Integrated Biaxial (10 years). The child co-ordinates the whole field with both horizontal and vertical axes used as references. Drawings contain 'middle ground' linking foreground and middle ground.

Implications for Teaching

As Children grow, their natural ability to perceive and represent the geometric complexity of our three-dimensional world. The sets of stages emphasise the importance of grasping spatial relationships with objects and showing these in way to demonstrate the relationship through perspective drawing techniques.

Teachers gain insight into a child's spatial perception through examining their drawings. From observation, It can be thought through as to what activities to provide to increase a child's awareness of special relationships and representation. By engaging children in activities that aim to develop positional and comparative language (such as in front, behind, near, far, beside, closer, taller, shorter) but these are not linked to exploring ways of representing these ideas through drawings. It is not a way of 'training' children to draw a certain way but a way of helping them explore relations between three-dimensional scenes and two-dimensional representations.

"Whether an increase in the sophistication of a child's drawing indicates the development of spatial perception and/or an increase in geometric understanding, or whether it's a reflection of the child's drawing skills catching up with existing geometric perceptions, it is difficult to tell."

The four basic topological concepts:

• Proximity - the relative nearness of an object or event to any other object or event.
• Order - the sequence of objects or events (in time) according to size, colour or some other attribute. For example, if three toys are suspended in a line over a crib long enough for an infant to become familiar with them, he/she will notice if the sequence of the toys is changed.
• Separation - an object, event or 'space' coming between other objects or events. It also involves distinguishing between objects and parts of objects.
• Enclosure - an object or event surrounded by other objects or events, which involves the ideas of inside, outside and between.

"The idea of a simple closed curve is also important and helps to explain why very young children perceive shapes such as circles, squares and triangles as being essentially the same shape, particularly when they draw their own."

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Sources

- https://nrich.maths.org/2485 [01/10/17]

- https://nrich.maths.org/2483 [01/10/17]