Parenting

One topic I want to dive into particularly deeply coming out of the Study Group in Reggio Emilia is that of toddlers making representations: choosing to draw or paint or otherwise create a representation of another object.

Background

On a visit to a preschool in Reggio Emilia I observed four children in the infant-toddler room (so, <18 months old) sitting on chairs around a table.  On the table in front of each child was an orange, a sheet of paper, a paintbrush, and a set of paints in different shades of orange.  The children were painting with orange paint (because that’s the only color choice they had) onto the paper in a variety of lines, blobs, and squiggles.  In a Q&A session after we looked around the school I asked the Pedagogista (the school’s head teacher/learning coordinator) whether she thought the children were in fact representing oranges in paint on their paper and she said unequivocally “yes”: “What the child paints may not look like an orange but it represents that to them.”

About a year ago – long before I learned about the Reggio approach to children’s learning – I read Pennie Brownlee’s booklet Magic Places, a guide to supporting young children’s creative art work.  Brownlee states: “Children working in the scribbling stage [age 0-6 years] are not depicting anything.  Because they’re not depicting anything, it is inappropriate to ask a scribbler, “What are you drawing?”  It is equally inappropriate to ask a scribbler to draw any particular thing: they are making marks and patterns” (Magic Places p.27).  Brownlee does go on to note that the “symbol stage” lasts from 4 to 10 years so apparently may be some overlap between the two stages, but according to Brownlee’s definition children younger than four are unlikely to be depicting anything. Continue Reading