Drawing and scribbling is not just an entertaining and fun activity for children, it can be an important educational tool, apart from building an important step in the development of psychomotor skills and a valuable means of communication.
A group of British experts vindicates the educational value of the drawings, placing them at the same level as speaking, reading and writing as basic and essential skills for the correct learning of the child.
It is not about drawing as artists or developing difficult skills, but about using the drawings to represent their environment, concepts, facilitating and demonstrating understanding ... And we can visually represent many things, as the saying "a picture is worth more than a thousand words".
And, although this is not always the case, and we cannot deny the value of verbal language, it is clear that visual language is becoming increasingly important in our environment and we cannot miss its potential, as in the case of drawings, diagrams, diagrams , sketches ...
The psychologist Shaaron Ainsworth, of the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom), and other authors comment in an article appeared in the latest issue of the journal "Science" the boom that is undergoing academic research on the pedagogical advantages of knowing how to represent graphically, especially in the scientific field.
Although they regret that, in practice, this activity is not considered as it deserves. These are some of the educational advantages of drawing:
In the classroom, the student is involved in the activities, instead of confining him to a passive role as a receiver of information.
It helps to understand the scientific reality, often represented in graphics, sketches and other kinds of non-verbal speeches.
Being able to manipulate graphic representations as schemas or diagrams to incorporate new ideas, or adapt them to observation, is a "different creative reasoning" and complementary to reasoning through argumentation.
Drawing is a pedagogical strategy that allows you to better organize what you have learned. Graphically representing a concept requires, in addition to synthesis capacity, spatial skills.
Drawing helps to communicate better. Hence, children's drawings often serve to discover what children feel, what they want to tell us through them.
It is clear that our children still have a few years to start making schemes, but in the meantime, we must encourage children to express themselves through their drawings. And some artist will also leave between them ...
