Children's visual representations of stories

Abstract

My research explores how children visualise stories told by their teacher. How do children transform a story into a drawing at the age of four? My research, however, does not restrict itself to stages of development in children's drawing, but try to understand how they re-interpret a story in images. How does the story change in their pictures? How do different children's drawings vary? Why? The children were given an opportunity to produce their own drawings after each story, and later were encouraged to speak about them. Given the art of four-year-old children is not always identifiable by adults, drawings are often seem as random and chaotic and it may be difficult for adults to make sense of. Therefore, this dissertation illustrates the meaning children give to their drawings and that visual illustrations are the first forms of prewriting skills the children use to explain their imagination. To show this, coloured markers were used rather than the simple pleasure of mixing paints, as to focus on basic linear representations of the stories they presented on paper. Their ideas were enhanced by the stories they heard and also by their own symbolic representations. This also encouraged the children to give meaning to the pictures they have drawn. When the children described their drawings, this helped me to understand the children at a deeper level, and therefore this research is based on this „understanding‟.