"Drawing to Learn"

These two children were asked to draw on existing knowledge to sketch pictures of where water comes from.

Andrea- There is water under the ground. People put the pipes in there and that's how the water gets inside your house and it becomes tap water. The trees get their water through the roots because they don't have pipes.

Kevin- You can dig a hole and build a well to draw water from underground. First you dig a hole until you can see the water. Then you build a wall along the ground so people don't fall when they get the water. You need a bucket and a long rope to reach the water. That's how the well works.


"Children's drawings are not only beautiful to look at but more importantly they tell us much about how children think and see the world around them. You will find that whenever you ask a child to draw you a picture about an event of situation they often come to the table full of ideas and concepts of their own.

This is an excerpt from http://www.videatives.com/ and our esteemed friend and colleague Dr. George Forman.

Drawing to learn is a term coined by Dr G. Forman

This approach asks the children to represent, with marks, his/her current theory about how something works;not simply to make a representation of the shape or look of an event, but to draw an explanation of how it all works; that is, to draw his understanding. The child may go through various steps in this process.

The child commits his ideas to paper before actually viewing the event. having completed the drawing, he/she then visits the event or action in his/her drawing. The child returns to the drawing table to draw the combination of his ideas and his memory of what he saw. Together, these three parts demonstrate that children draw what they know (before the visit) and can study their drawings (after their visit) to help them reconstruct an incomplete theory (after the visit).

It is important to ask a child to draw before looking at an object so that drawing flows from the child's assumptions about function (for example how a bike works) rather than observation (how the bike looks as a static object).

In drawing to learn, one literally encourages the children to take risks and thus to make mistakes so that their misconceptions can become visible and thereby more explicitly repaired."