Let’s Say Thanks

[clearspring_widget title=”Xerox – Let’s Say Thanks” wid=”47d6d01110aa5765″ pid=”4936ae7dcc5da97d” width=”307″ height=”361″ domain=”widgets.clearspring.com”]

This is so easy to do and the student art is fantastic. Thanks to Xerox for providing Let’s Say Thanks for our troops. Click on the orange buttons to scroll through the pictures. If you are a parent of a child under 5 or 6 this is the kind of artwork you have to look forward to when your child enters elementary school.  Right how, however, you might be wondering about the drawings of people your child is bringing home from Day Nursery.  Always in search of more information about early childhood development, I headed down the hall of my office to talk to Lora Barlow, Inclusion Specialist at our Child Care Answersprogram (check out their new blog on our blogroll).  She knows a lot about the cognitive development of children.  One of her reference materials is a website from Stanford University.   There I found some interesting information about the stages a young child goes through when learning to draw.  A tadpole picture is one of the first steps before  young children learn to draw conventional pictures. It consists of a circle with a face and at least two lines coming out of it, sometimes four. The circle may represent the head and body combined, where the lines are arms and/or legs. A question in child development asks why children first draw pictures this way. A common explanation for the ubiquitous tadpole stage is that children are merely trying to symbolize a person and do not put a premium on realism. I have to admit, a lot of what I read on this website is way over my head, but it has some very interesting illustrations of the stages of drawing a young child goes through that I think are worth a click!