Drawing in Pre-school Children as a Strategy for Preparation for School

Abstract

It is well known that pre-school age is the period of grate importance for psychological development and for preparation for school. The process of learning and achievements at school depends on the types of activities selected at pre-school level. Unfortunately, it is often to find out that introduction of writing and reading is among the most common activities in pre-school institutions all over the world. The goal of our article is to share a formative experience of drawing as suitable activity for children development at preschool age. Mexican and Colombian preschool children were included in the study aged between 5 and 6 years. All children belonged to suburban area of the cities state of Tlaxcala (Mexico) and Bogota (Colombia) and assisted to pre-school official level without any kind of previous experience in drawing. The original program for gradual formation of drawing by stages was applied for 8 months daily during 1 hour. The program included different stages with rich activities directed to analyses of objects and its essential features, denomination, classification, differentiation, comparison of objects, analyses of basic shapes and spatial organization of details. After that graphic representation of shapes were used with the help of constant external orientation. All children were tested before and after application of the program. Specific tasks were selected from Brief Neuropsychological Assessment [29] for assessment of children. Among the tasks were included: Copy of objects with elements of spatial orientation, free drawing, production of drawings by categorical instructions. After program application children from experimental group showed qualitative positive achievements in graphic representations of objects, spatial orientation, number of drawings and of essential features of represented objects. We conclude that drawing is extremely useful activity for preparation for school learning, especially for writing process. Drawing activity had positive effect for spatial functions and images of objects in visual modality. We suggest that our program might be used in pre-school official institutions with in order to guarantee required level psychological formation of pre-school age.