Abstract
The preschool age is called the golden age of drawing; drawing is a “golden” mediator of literacy development. In this article, we focus on the content the preschool children put into their drawings. The goal of study has been the comparison of preschool children’s drawings with respect to the thematic categories of drawn object, and to identify differences between boys and girls. There were analyzed pictures (N=61) drawn by preschool children, from 5 years and 9 months to 6 years and 11 months. Pictures were drawn following the content-neutral (indifferent) instruction: “Draw, what is on your mind now.” The obtained data were subjected to thematic and frequency analysis. Results: data shows that the average number of objects is higher in girls’ drawings: girls drew 4±5 objects on average, while boys drew only 2±2. The number of drawn objects increases with age. Objects drawn could be divided onto 14 thematic categories; most popular are natural objects (sun, mammal, flowers, clouds etc.). The most popular theme in the group of boys are Vehicles, in girls group themes vary more. Practical impact: if we know what children like to draw, we have a strong motivating element for the development of communication literacy, especially writing.
Highlights
Literacy is viewed in many different ways in science and education
We focus on the analysis of themes which appear in the drawings
The goals of study are: - to describe and analyze contents in the preschool children’s spontaneous drawings, - to compare our findings with respect to the gender, and - to compare the results with the existing knowledge
Summary
Literacy is viewed in many different ways in science and education. Customarily, literacy is contrasted with orality (oral tradition), which encompasses a broad set of strategies for communicating through oral and aural media (Foley, 2021). The preparatory period for the development of literacy culminates in preschool age, sometimes referred to as “the golden age” of drawing (Saracho & Spodek, 2013). In our study we use the following narrow definition: Preschool age as “the period of the last year in the kindergarten”, respectively “the year when the child is enrolled in the elementary school first grade”. That is, according to the Czech legislative, “the year when the child turns 6 years of age” (i.e. identically with the term “kindergarten” in the US English) (e.g., Daniela, 2018). For this period, a game in all its form is symptomatic, and drawing is a kind of game for preschoolers
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