Did you know…

Children draw a certain way at a certain age for a reason. It’s true. The stages of how a child’s drawing skills develop as they grow older is really interesting. Several great minds over the years have done research on this sort of thing; i.e. people like Viktor Lowenfeld and Betty Edwards. Our Program educators look to these models quite a bit in order to structure projects for our students. This is also one of the first things we teach Program Interns when they participate in our Youth Program Teaching Internship. Here are two of the earlier stages via Viktor Lowenfeld for you (using artwork from PNCA’s Youth Program, of course).

The Preschematic Stage (ages 3 – 4): Children consciously attempt to draw the human form. Children also start incorporating symbols and telling stories with their drawings.

The Schematic Stage (Age 6): Children figure out a definite way of portraying an object/person/animal/etc. This ‘schema’ represents the child’s knowledge of the subject. During this stage children also start to understand there is definite order to spacial relationships.

Pretty cool, right! (I’m kinda a geek about this stuff.) Anyway, we’ll be sharing interesting art education theory via this blog from time to time so that you can better understand the roots of our curriculum! See if you can spot the Preschematic and Schematic stages in some of our most recent Flickr uploads.