Painting and drawing are categorised under Creative Development within the Foundation Stage curriculum. The document Curriculum guidance for the foundation stage rightly states that creativity is fundamental to successful learning. Being creative enables children to make connections between one area of learning and another and so extend understanding.
Art is a universal form of communication, crossing cultures and time. Margaret Morgan in Art in Practice (Nash Pollack Publishing, 15.99) talks about art being a vital element in a child's education - 'like a primary colour, nothing else can stand in its stead'.
When 'communication' is mentioned, writing is probably the first image that springs to mind, but writing is beyond the capabilities of most children within the Foundation Stage. For a great many young children, their drawings and paintings will be their principal form of communication after talking and playing.
From a very early age children will respond spontaneously to an event, feeling or situation by making marks in or on any available surface - be it spaghetti sauce, mud or paper. Dawn and Fred Sedgwick in Drawing to Learn (Hodder &Stoughton, out of print) comment that the first act of the human race was to make a mark, not interpret one. They go on to say that we put a lot of emphasis on reading instead of drawing and writing - interpreting marks before the making.
We all learn through our five senses and art offers young children, in particular, countless opportunities to explore the world around them and to 'say something' about what they have explored and discovered. They might convey through painting the colours and shapes of the ducks they have observed, through crayons and pastels the excitement they feel about going to a party, through clay the form and texture of the guinea pig they have been holding. The paint, crayons, pastels and clay offer children the opportunities to express and communicate their ideas, thoughts and feelings through colour, line, shape and form, plus texture in both two and three dimensions.
Children need to be given a wide range of resources to work with so they can discover the potential of the material - what it will and won't do. This encourages them to make choices and take risks. A child may use clay to convey the spikiness of the prickles on a conker, but use pastels to convey the blurred reflection of a tree on the water. Being able to control a material and manipulate it in order to communicate what you have seen or felt is very gratifying. We all see and interpret things differently, so every work of art by a child will draw upon the child's imagination and originality and will be unique. When they see that this is valued by adults, the child's self-esteem grows. As children are taught about the materials and how to use them, they become more independent and confident.
The children's ability to investigate materials and make art develops over time, as do their powers of interpretation. As well as being able to use materials, the children will comment on how other artists have used them and what they are trying to convey. These other artists will range from other children in the setting to world-famous painters.
Most children will be able to tell you what they think is happening in a picture and how it has been made. For example, when looking at the painting 'Les Parapluies' (The Umbrellas) by Pierre Auguste Renoir, children will tell you where the people are, what they are doing, what the weather is like, what they might be saying or thinking, what colours Renoir used, which colours are dominant and why.
Over the past couple of decades, various reports on art education have concluded that it makes vital contributions towards the development of physical and perceptual skills, the ability for creative thought and actions, the education of feelings, the exploration of values and the understanding of cultural change and differences.
We are reminded in Curriculum guidance for the foundation stage that young children's learning cannot be compartmentalised. One activity can often develop several concepts from the different areas of learning. Rhoda Kellogg states in Children's Drawings, Children's Minds (Mayfield) that scribbling is an excellent stimulus to eye and brain and says, 'Scribbling and drawing are the best mental preparation I know for enabling children to learn to read easily and well at age six.'
British painter David Hockney has spoken about the fact that everybody learns to write because we are taught to write, but more often than not we are not taught to draw. 'I've come to the conclusion that drawing should be taught very seriously everywhere... if you can draw, even a little bit, you can express all kinds of ideas that might otherwise be lost - delights, frustrations, whatever torments or pleases you. Drawing helps put your thoughts in order. It can make you think in different ways.'
Hockney also points out the crucial distinction between writing and drawing, or the arts in general. When we are drawing, painting or modelling, we are learning to look. 'It's not the beauty of the marks we like in writing; it's the beauty of the ideas. But in drawing it is a bit of both - it's beauty of ideas, of feelings and of marks.'
Recommended book list
* A Child's Book of Play in Art by Lucy Mickelthwaite (Dorling Kindersley, 9.99)
* I Spy An Alphabet/ Transport/Animals/Numbers in Art by Lucy Mickelthwaite (Collins, 6.99 each)
* Spot a Cat and Spot a Dog by Lucy Mickelthwaite (Dorling Kindersley, Pounds 4.99 each)
* Oxford First Book of Art by Gillian Wolfe (OUP, 6.99)
* Van Gogh's House, a pop-up experience by Bob Hersey, (Bellew Publishing, 8.95)
* Annotated Guides, Art, Robert Cumming (Dorling Kindersley, 16.99)
* Adventures in Art series: The Blue Rider, Sister Wendy's Story of Christmas, One Day in Japan with Hokusai, Can You Spot the Leopard?, African Masks, Dreaming Pictures, Paul Klee, Now you see it - now you don't, Rene Magritte (Prestel, 9.95 each)
