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Drawing and Writing Development in Young Children
Whether it is on paper or the walls, 15 months-2.5 months old babies’ first attempt to writing is scribbling.3 As the toddlers enter stage 2, about 2-3 years old, they gain more fine motor skills. 3 They continue to scribble but cover more surface with their artistry and experiment with different types of lines including open circles, diagonal, curved, horizontal, or vertical lines. From 2.5-3 years old, they go from scribbling to lines and patterns. 3 When asked about their pictures, what may look like bigger scribble curves, they are likely to tell a more elaborate story than their art/writing. By the time toddlers are between 3-5 years old they are planning their pictures, giving more details to the pictures, and representing their surroundings such as the sun represented by a circle. Young students, even prior to entering formal school, seem to already have curiosity about writing in connection with their drawing. As these young toddlers enter kindergarten, these skills are used to help with their writing progression.
Kindergarten Writing Progression
Many students enter kindergarten with limited exposure to formal writing or phonic skills. The progression explains the stages of writing development that kindergartners go through. The kindergarten writing progression shows that pictures and writing is intertwined. Students’ early instincts for picture drawing help support students’ early writing development. Kindergarten writing progression can be broken down into 5 stages. In stage 1, the pre-phonemic stage, students are scribbling, drawing, and writing mock letters, still trying to understand that the English language has directionality (from left to right) and that letters have a certain shape.4 At stage 2, the early phonemic stage, students are writing in letter strings in which actual letters move from left to right, and some students are writing in groups of letters with spaces in between.4 Stage 3, the letter name stage, is the early phonemic stage in which students use pictures. In stage 4, the transitional stage, students can write the beginning and ending sound for the word they are trying to spell.4 In stage 5, the conventional writing stage, students are beginning to write the middle sound as well, and are starting to write beginning, middle, and ending sounds.4 They are also starting to write phrases and whole sentences.4
Each writer progresses at a different pace, so while one student may be at stage 1 of writing another may be in stage 4. Throughout most of the progression, students’ use of art including lines and picture drawing is evident as they try to learn how to write in text. The progression is deliberate to show both picture writing and text writing in the progression because it shows that that art and text works collaboratively. This picture and text relationship is something that has also been seen throughout history.
Historical Connection: Chinese Pictographs to Modern Writing Systems
Pictures and text have been intertwined throughout history. In ancient Chinese civilization, for instance, many Chinese characters originated from pictures of objects, and as time went by, “the characters became more stylized and less pictorial.” 5
In the late Neolithic period, the ancient Chinese commonly engraved pictographs, or pictures that represented a word or phrase, on jades and potteries to show ownership. 6 From those pictographs evolved the earliest forms of Chinese writing: oracle-bones scripts 7. The oracle-bones scripts, written on turtle shells and animal bones, answered questions that ancient Chinese had about their lives and about life after death. 6 Pictures along with the earliest form of Chinese writing helped to make sense of the world.
As the Chinese language evolved, the language’s artistic and visual elements remained. Unlike the modern English alphabet where there are letters and a phonetic system, each modern Chinese character still has a distinct visual form and every word has a special symbol. While some Chinese words still shows pictograph origin, many Chinese characters have become more abstract.8 Unlike compound words in English where knowing separate words can be helpful to decipher a compound word—trash and can making the word trashcan—Chinese characters are all learned in isolation because each word is a stand alone.9 This means that there are thousands of Chinese characters instead of the 26 letters that can be mixed and matched to create a word. 10 Therefore, it takes a lot of time to learn how to read and write the language through rewriting and memorizing the symbols.11 The current Chinese language has two systems of writing. One traditional and one simplified. Traditional Chinese is an older form of writing and has many more character strokes than simplified Chinese. In 1958, the Chinese writing system made massive changes to the traditional characters and found ways to simplify the Chinese characters. 12 As the name suggests, simplified Chinese is a simple version of the traditional Chinese because it has fewer strokes, which meant it was easier to learn how to read and write. Despite many political debates over the two forms, it was important to cultivate literacy in China. Nonetheless, the Chinese language shows that the language originated from pictures and even after changes to the language; there are still artistic and distinct flare to the thousands of unique Chinese characters.
Chinese Calligraphy
Someone who may be unfamiliar with Chinese calligraphy may lay their eyes on the piece of work and wonder what are all squiggles that go up and down instead of side to side as seen in the English written language. Are they art or are they words?
Chinese Calligraphy or “the art of writing” 13 has no distinction between whether it is art or words and has been found on wooden tablets, silk, and paper throughout history. 14 In fact, Kwo Da-Wei, author of Chinese Brushwork in Calligraphy and Painting: Its History, Aesthetics, and Techniques, wrote
“Chinese artists have all along been ready to exploit the advantages made possible by the close relationship between calligraphy and painting. In fact, they use the theories of painting and impart the techniques of calligraphy to their painting. The same strokes are evident in both. Thus, the two arts blended into one.” 15
Chinese calligraphy brushwork has been dated back to the Shang Dynasty (14th century), even before brushwork and painting were introduced together. 16 Calligraphy requires brushes and ink, more specifically black ink. Calligraphy is a thoughtful process for every stroke. It is intricate because the calligrapher has to determine the varying speed, pressure, and movement for the particular effects that that the writer-artist wants to produce. 17 Depending on the brushwork, it can give dry, moist, heavy, light, swift, slow, diluted, shallow, deep, scattered, clustered, or flowing effect.18
The calligrapher is aware of the impact of the brushwork and “reveal(s) much more than physical motion; they reveal much of the writer himself-his impulsiveness, restraint, elegance, rebelliousness.” 19 It is almost as if the art within the writing is speaking to the audience of who the author is through the brushwork.
Dawn Delbanco, a professor of Western and Eastern art at Columbia university notes how calligraphy have this push pull motion where the calligrapher expresses within limits but also with freedom. She compares calligraphy to dancing, that
“The calligrapher and the dancer have much in common: each must learn choreographed movements; each must maintain compositional order. But once the rules have been observed, each may break free within certain boundaries to express personal vitality.” 20
Chinese calligraphy has shown that writing and art are intertwined—not separate but working together to produce self-expression.
Historical Connection: Egyptian Hieroglyphs
While the ancient Chinese used pictographs and calligraphy to express and explain the world around them, the ancient Egyptians also used a type of picture writing system famously known as Hieroglyphic. Similar to the ancient Chinese pictographs, hieroglyphs consisted of pictures, a beautiful visual communication system. It differs from Chinese pictographs because while pictures can be symbols that represent the object, Hieroglyphs were pictures of real things in the ancient Egyptian’s world that represented an idea, also known as ideogram or idea writing. 21 For example, hieroglyph of a mouth would be depicted as an oval with two sharp ends or hieroglyph of their Gods. 22 It also had symbols for letters, similar to the 26 letters in English. 23 Hieroglyphs also consisted of phonograms, which are signs that constitute a sound. 24
The word Hieroglyphs derived from the Greek words meaning sacred carving and to the Egyptians means divine speech because they believed that those were God’s words. 25 Only people with high status such as the royals, nobles, priests, and scribes were able to read hieroglyphs.26 The priest used hieroglyphs to write prayers and text about the after-life. Pharaoh’s tombs were commonly decorated with hieroglyphs that described their life and their afterlife.27 Civil officials also used hieroglyphs to document historical events and calculations crucial for knowing the Nile’s depth for agricultural purposes.28 It was through the pictures of hieroglyphs that helped the ancient Egyptians understood the unknown and creates meaning just as the ancient Chinese did with their pictographs.
Hieroglyphic writing was a mystery and a challenge for archeologist to decipher the meaning for several reasons. Hieroglyphics could be read side-to-side, up and down, right to left, or left to right with no spaces 29 which left early archeologists in wonder. For some time, scholars studied hieroglyphs in their pictorial aspect because it was an integral part of the language. It was not until later that scholars started to look at Hieroglyphic with the idea that it represented sounds and ideas. 30 The discovery of the Rosetta Stone shed some light on the unsolved puzzle in 1799.31 The Rosetta stone had hieroglyphs on the top third of the stone while the bottom had a Greek translation that scholars were able to use to understand the mysterious Egyptian language.32
The examples of the ancient Chinese and Egyptian Hieroglyphs show that writing and art are closely related. These two ancient civilizations used pictures as a system of visual communication to help make sense and meaning in their lives. Picture writings from the ancient civilizations parallel kindergarteners’ writing progression because students’ picture writing is not perceived as a separate entity. In fact, the pictures or the art are viewed as writing just as the ancient Chinese viewed their characters and the Egyptian viewed their hieroglyphs. It is art and also writing.
Historical Connection: The Latin alphabet
Many kindergarteners enter the classroom needing to learn how to write the Latin alphabet; also known as the Roman alphabet; it seems to be a rote chore. However, as we explore the evolution of the Latin alphabet, we see that, like Chinese pictograms and Hieroglyphics, the alphabet derived from pictures. Learning to write is more artistic than the rote skill that one may perceive learning the alphabet to be.
Egyptian Hieroglyphs were amongst the earliest known alphabet in which each hieroglyph represented a letter. Egyptian hieroglyphs influenced people including the Ancient Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Canannites to create a rendition of their own and use their own pictures to signify a consonant sound. They differ from Egyptian hieroglyphs, though, by using their own pictures to signify a consonant sound. The Phoenicians, from modern day Syria, Lebanon, and Northern Israel, 33 took it one step further and simplified the pictures even more and rotated the pictures.34 Even now, one can look at the alphabet and see reminders of the pictures that the letters were based on. For example, the letter A started out as a picture of an ox’s head, and the letter k looks like a hand’s palm.35
The alphabet later on evolved because while the Semitic languages like Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and Egyptian languages had no problems having only consonants, the Greeks needed some vowels. Therefore, the Greeks took matters into their own hands, and took unnecessary consonants and created vowels. They even added a few more symbols for sounds that they needed for their language.
Unlike hieroglyphics where there are various word directionalities, the Phoenicians wrote from right to left. The Greeks initially followed the Phoenicians, but then later experimented with multiple directionalities. The Greeks changed direction for every new line, but then changed the system again where they started to write from left to write, a directionality that all alphabets since have adopted.36 Kindergarteners and Latin alphabet pioneers are similar in that as they are experiencing and creating words and language, they are also experimenting with it in various ways to fit their style and needs.
Western Calligraphy
Prior to the technology shift in school, many schools required students to learn how to write in cursive, Western calligraphy. In fact, as a young child, I looked forward to learning cursive because it was beautiful, loopy, and artistic; I had a feeling of maturity because I saw a lot of adults wrote in cursive.
It was with the development of cursive writing that lower case letters came about, thanks to the Romans. 37 Even after the fall of the Romans, cursive was still prevalent and became part of religious texts such as the beautiful illuminated text, The Book of Kells. The Book of Kells is an example of a text that is hard to separate to separate the art and text because the words are is beautifully decorated and evidently carefully and thoughtfully written out. In the United States, cursive writing was used for important private and official documents such as the Declaration of Independence. 38 Although cursive is not commonly used in in the 21st century, it is undeniable that cursive has been part of our rich history and intertwined with art.
Unlike Chinese calligraphy which relies heavily and solely on brush and ink, cursive letters were typically written in pen or ink on paper or parchment unless cursive was written in large forms, then the calligrapher would use a large brush or chisel. Just as the type of brush and ink were very important for the effect of Chinese calligraphy, the type of pen for Western calligraphy was also very important. The precision of how the pen, or quill, is cut, the quill’s angle as it writes, and when the calligrapher should lift the quill up all impact the letter formations. 39 Cursive, like Chinese calligraphy, is very artistic in that the medium being used is not taken lightly because the effect of the product partially relies on the medium being used.
The Arts’ Academic and Cultural Benefits
Some teachers may be hesitant to incorporate art into their lessons because of the limited time to pack in so many curriculums and standards that are mandated by the state or district. But to think of using art as an add-on neglects its academic benefits. The arts can stimulate higher level of thinking because it can
“provide the tools to help students develop intellectual muscle for paying careful attention, recording accurately, and analyzing from multiple points of view. And they might offer one of the few reliable routes to understanding the world not only as it is, but as we might imagine it to be. The arts will help our students develop minds spry and courageous enough to function at a high level in a world constantly in a flux.” 40
To help students feel personally invested in their learning we need culturally responsive teaching. Researcher Geneva Gay defines culturally responsive teaching “as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.” 41 Geoffrey Caine, a researcher who mingled brain research, psychology, small group processes, system thinking, and education otherwise known as natural learning, stated in one of his 12 principles that, “People are born with an explanatory drive. This means that everyone tends to filter input, organize information and experience, and ask questions according to what they are interested in and care about.” 42 In thinking about culturally responsive teaching, Gay and Caine seem to both agree that the learning needs to be personally and culturally relevant to make the content stick for the students. This is where the arts can be a tool for self-expression to explore who they are and create connections from their own lives through meaningful arts activity that can bring out the students’ individual cultural and personal beauty.
Last year, I had a unit on Lunar New Year in which I first showed different pictures and had students discuss. Vividly, I remember when my students saw the firecracker pictures, many little hands shot up into the air, eager to explain what that picture was. One little boy in a rocking chair explained that, “It’s fireworks! You can see it during bbq day.” Prompting more about bbq day, I learned that he meant July 4th. Another student with a Vietnamese background could not retain his eagerness anymore so he blurted out, “No, that’s firecrackers for Chinese New Year! It’s is very loud!” This little episode zooms in a scenario where students were ecstatic when they were able to give their cultural perspectives and sharing their personal experiences about it through an image.
Half the battle of teaching is engagement, and using the arts is part of that piece that can help bring excitement and relevance to students.
Arts as an Entry Point
It is common that people think kindergarteners play and draw all day, and not a lot of core academics like writing are happening. But if we think about how the arts work hand in hand with writing development, we can see how drawing is a part of the core academics, and we can use students’ multiple intelligences to support their learning in their writing process. Beth Olshansky author of Making Writing a Work of Art: Image-Making within the Writing Process, explains that “ Highly visual and kinesthetic by nature, the image-making process provides an enticing alternate pathway into writing for children with a variety of learning styles.” 43 This means the arts can help students with a variety of intelligences: visual learners may need to draw first before writing, and kinesthetic learners may need to act out their thoughts before being able to articulate them. The art can create joy and motivation for the writing process as well as entry points for students with different strengths and intelligences to become better writers.
Furthermore, pictures create sensory context that is exceptionally helpful when English Language Learners’ language understanding is limited. They can use other senses through the arts to understand what they are having challenges to understand in English. Pictures also tap into English Language Learners’ prior knowledge, which can help develop vocabulary, necessary for reading and writing. In thinking about my own students, of whom 20% are English Language Learners, I realize that the arts provide an entry point for various types of learners.
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