How Drawing Promotes the Holistic Development of 4–5-Year-Old Children: A Bridge to Language, Cognition, and Cultural Identity
According to Gov (2023), through art experiences, children can learn how to use design elements and other meaning-making strategies to communicate complex information, which supports the development of traditional reading and writing skills as they grow older. For children, drawing is not merely an artistic activity but a language—they use brushes to express emotions, develop fine motor skills and sensory abilities, and expand imagination and cognitive thinking. As an early childhood education practitioner, I deeply understand the beneficial role of art for children. It serves as a language they can truly master—they use colours to express emotions, images to tell stories, and creation to build an understanding of the world.
Therefore, I have created this website to share my understanding of drawing and child development, as well as to discuss current teaching policies. On this website, you will find:
Why drawing is so important, including its benefits for motor and sensory development, imagination and cognitive enhancement, and language and literacy skills.
How teachers can create a safe, supportive, and encouraging environment for children to engage in new creations.
Teaching strategies based on drawing.
How to integrate Indigenous and multicultural elements into drawing instruction.
I hope this website will serve as a source of inspiration and a practical toolkit for observing children, supporting their development, and designing lessons in your teaching. Let us work together to open children's inner worlds with paintbrushes and help them construct their understanding of the world.
Why is painting important?
Motor Skills and Sensory Development
From the perspective of motor skills and sensory development, drawing plays a significant role in supporting the comprehensive development of children aged 4 to 5. At this stage, children's fine motor skills develop and gradually mature. This is also a stage where they can hold pencils or crayons by themselves like adults for the first time. Besides, children at this stage are capable of completing basic tasks like drawing specific patterns on paper. For instance, they can colour and fill simple shapes within pre-drawn lines, demonstrating their preliminary spatial control abilities.
During drawing, movements like operating drawing tools require children to have stable control of their hand muscles. This kind of activity helps strengthen their hand strength as well as their body flexibility. In addition, drawing effectively improves their hand-eye coordination, which enables them to develop high precision and coordination skills, preparing them for more complex tasks in the future.
More importantly, drawing is more than merely a simple activity that exercises children’s body muscles and motor control; it is also a highly sensory-integrated experiential process. To finish a drawing task, children have to concentrate and observe the lines and colours on paper, feel the friction between the brush and paper, smell the paint, and hear the sounds of drawing. At the same time, they touch their artwork with their fingers and trace the lines with their eye, which engages multiple senses such as touch, sight, and hearing. With repeated drawing, children are offered the opportunity to explore their own senses. As a result, given constant sensory experiences, their understanding of space, structure, texture, and touch deepens and expands.
Enhancing Imagination and Cognition
Art, through different artistic traditions and practices, not only expands children’s cognition and imagination but also promotes their understanding of diverse cultures. According to Eisner (1979), young children gradually form visual concepts based on what they perceive. These visual concepts that they perceive, in most cases, constitute their earliest and most explicit expressions of thought. For example, common and simple images in painting, such as the sun, trees, flowers, and people, although derived from their life experiences, are typically subject to children’s subjective processing and imaginative construction. When they want to express the concepts mentioned above, they have to ‘invent’ a visual symbol—a graphic form that has some association with the meaning they would like to convey. Such a process represents the formation of symbolic ability in the early stage. Concepts that cannot be clearly expressed in language are transformed in their minds, turning into more concrete images, and then expressed through drawing. Children are well-engaged in this process by creating symbols and constructing meaning for them. Additionally, painting itself, as an open-ended medium, provides children with an unrestricted space for expression. Different from formulaic question-and-answer tasks, painting does not have ‘right or wrong’ as a standard, allowing children to draw with ambiguity, openness, and multiple possible interpretations. This kind of activity unleashes children’s imagination and their creative potential. Children in such an environment are more inclined to bold experiment and express themselves freely rather than conform to adults’ judgements of “likeness” or “quality.” This self-expression-driven creative motivation is a manifestation of their innate creativity as well as an important channel into their understanding of the world.
Language and Emotional Expression
For children aged 4 to 5, more ways are provided to express themselves: ask numerous questions, retell events from stories, or describe things they have done. Adoniou (2013) believes that children closely observe numbers in pictures, the precise quantities of materials, arrows indicating sequences, and detailed depictions of objects related to the purpose of the photograph. These visual images provide direct and vital support for the language tools children need for writing.
Therefore, drawing can serve as an essential bridge between the literacy skills children are equipped with when they start school education (regardless of language) and the literacy skills required for academic success in the future. In the case where children express plots and concepts through drawing, what they are doing is practising their narrative logic, expressing their understanding, constructing language in their minds, and attempting to present it. Consequently, these skills transfer to traditional literacy skills, including expanding children’s vocabulary and improving narrative abilities.
On the other hand, drawing can also serve as an outlet for children’s emotional expression. Many children use drawing to express themselves, especially their thoughts and stories. For instance, children may use different colours to represent different emotions: blue for sadness, red for anger, warm colours when they are happy, cool colours when they are anxious or sad, and so on. On some occasions, they release negative emotions by drawing scenes that make them feel uneasy. Therefore, it is crucial for teachers to observe the content of children’s drawings, as this helps identify their emotional state, which ensures appropriate support will be provided promptly.
Effective Learning Environment
In the context of early childhood education, drawing is not merely an artistic activity but also a crucial channel for young children to express their emotions, construct specific meanings, and develop their language skills. From the perspective of early childhood educators, it is essential to create and maintain a safe, supportive, and encouraging environment for children to draw freely.
To begin with, drawing activities often involve tools such as paints, scissors, and brushes in a certain area. Accordingly, teachers must ensure that the layout of this area is safe and reasonable: sturdy tables and chairs, a dry floor that prevents any slips, and the tools used in the drawing activities are safe and non-toxic. It is the teachers’ responsibility to ensure the materials involved are placed within easy reach of children and to supervise children during the drawing process. All of these measures prevent accidents such as accidental paint ingestion, children cutting themselves with scissors, slipping, or getting injured from improper use of materials. This is to create a safe environment for children to demonstrate creativity in drawing activities.
Additionally, ample and diverse materials (such as different types of drawing paper, paints, drawing tools, thick crayons, thick pencils, finger paints, etc.) should be prepared in advance. Teachers also need to respect the paces of different children, offering them guidance and leaving them time to explore and create freely. The teacher’s positive responses and appropriate guidance also constitute a large part of a supportive environment. Teachers should ask children questions to encourage their listening and writing skills, help them expand their creative themes, provide appropriate guidance to explore their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and continuously develop their abilities while providing corresponding assistance.
Finally, the primary method of supporting young children’s exploration of drawing is to allow them to start drawing on their own. The teachers can respond to children’s creations to affirm the importance of drawing and enhance their awareness of its quality (Dinham & Chalk, 2018). This requires teachers to provide appropriate encouragement and affirmation in timely responses, and patient listening, which are crucial for children’s comprehensive development. Regarding the teacher’s accompaniment and guidance, the teachers can try asking some open-ended questions to stimulate their thinking, such as, ‘You used so much blue. What kind of feeling are you trying to express?’ Affirm their drawings and encourage them to tell stories through their artworks, which also improves their language organisation and storytelling abilities. Above all, positive feedback can make children feel that their ideas are seen and valued, and they will be more willing to continue trying, sharing, and exploring.
Effective Learning Environment
In the context of early childhood education, drawing is not merely an artistic activity but also a crucial channel for young children to express their emotions, construct specific meanings, and develop their language skills. From the perspective of early childhood educators, it is essential to create and maintain a safe, supportive, and encouraging environment for children to draw freely.
To begin with, drawing activities often involve tools such as paints, scissors, and brushes in a certain area. Accordingly, teachers must ensure that the layout of this area is safe and reasonable: sturdy tables and chairs, a dry floor that prevents any slips, and the tools used in the drawing activities are safe and non-toxic. It is the teachers’ responsibility to ensure the materials involved are placed within easy reach of children and to supervise children during the drawing process. All of these measures prevent accidents such as accidental paint ingestion, children cutting themselves with scissors, slipping, or getting injured from improper use of materials. This is to create a safe environment for children to demonstrate creativity in drawing activities.
Additionally, ample and diverse materials (such as different types of drawing paper, paints, drawing tools, thick crayons, thick pencils, finger paints, etc.) should be prepared in advance. Teachers also need to respect the paces of different children, offering them guidance and leaving them time to explore and create freely. The teacher’s positive responses and appropriate guidance also constitute a large part of a supportive environment. Teachers should ask children questions to encourage their listening and writing skills, help them expand their creative themes, provide appropriate guidance to explore their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and continuously develop their abilities while providing corresponding assistance.
Practical Strategies
Teachers provide a supportive environment
According to Outcome 4 of the Australian Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), children are confident and active learners. Therefore, teachers can provide supportive assistance to children and play a key guiding role in children’s drawing. Timely and positive responses from teachers encourage children to express their ideas. Teachers can also ask open-ended questions to guide children to reflect. Additionally, encouragement from teachers can promote the expansion of their drawing ideas, imagination, and creativity, while also improving children’s motor skills to a certain extent. When children come across difficulties in expressing themselves, teachers should listen attentively, kneel down to observe, and use smiles or nods to build their confidence in communication and expression. Appropriate assistance is necessary, allowing children to develop independently and expand their cognitive abilities. Also, new vocabulary or concepts can be introduced during discussions about their work. For example, words such as ‘bright colours’ and ‘birds are singing promote children’s vocabulary accumulation as well as their reading and writing skills, expanding their ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD).
On the other hand, during drawing activities, especially when using paints and watercolours, teachers can consciously guide children to recognise and explore the basic concepts of primary colours and then encourage them to try mixing the colours to discover the process of creating new colours. This not only improves their painting skills but also strengthens their understanding of visual language and visual expression patterns, which enhances their colour cognition on the whole.
Observe and record thoroughly
During painting instruction, teachers should observe and record children’s creative behaviour and expressive content, which is an important way to understand their development. Through observation, teachers can identify each child’s interests, emotional state, language ability, and the developmental stage they are in when children begin to express scenes related to a plot rather than just mere objects. The colours they use and the content of their drawings reveal their emotional state and interests. Therefore, sufficient observation and recording by teachers not only helps them discover children’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) and accordingly provide appropriate teaching scaffolding, but also helps them reflect on their lessons for a better plan. In addition, children’s drawing development trajectories should be recorded to form growth files, which serve as a bridge for communication with parents.
Promoting cultural diversity and peer expression
To explain cultural diversity, teachers can organise parent-child painting days. Such events encourage children to build close connections with their families and understand their own cultural backgrounds. Apart from that, teachers can also encourage children to create works that reflect the festivals and traditions in their cultures, and provide multicultural visual materials (eg, Indian mandalas, Indonesian batik, and Chinese ink paintings) to promote children’s cultural identity. Also, teachers can incorporate indigenous dot painting, finger painting, and natural materials into lessons to help children understand different methods of cultural expression.
Furthermore, teachers can organise group painting activities with peers as a way to enhance children’s participation, cooperation, social interaction, and collective expression. In such activities, children work together around a large sheet of paper or a wall to create an artwork with a specific theme. This also works on an A4-sized piece: when one child finishes, they pass it to the next so that everyone has a chance to express their independent ideas while integrating them with others’ creations. Children develop their listening, negotiation, social skills, and a sense of belonging to the group through collective painting.
Effective Learning Environment
In the context of early childhood education, drawing is not merely an artistic activity but also a crucial channel for young children to express their emotions, construct specific meanings, and develop their language skills. From the perspective of early childhood educators, it is essential to create and maintain a safe, supportive, and encouraging environment for children to draw freely.
To begin with, drawing activities often involve tools such as paints, scissors, and brushes in a certain area. Accordingly, teachers must ensure that the layout of this area is safe and reasonable: sturdy tables and chairs, a dry floor that prevents any slips, and the tools used in the drawing activities are safe and non-toxic. It is the teachers’ responsibility to ensure the materials involved are placed within easy reach of children and to supervise children during the drawing process. All of these measures prevent accidents such as accidental paint ingestion, children cutting themselves with scissors, slipping, or getting injured from improper use of materials. This is to create a safe environment for children to demonstrate creativity in drawing activities.
Additionally, ample and diverse materials (such as different types of drawing paper, paints, drawing tools, thick crayons, thick pencils, finger paints, etc.) should be prepared in advance. Teachers also need to respect the paces of different children, offering them guidance and leaving them time to explore and create freely. The teacher’s positive responses and appropriate guidance also constitute a large part of a supportive environment. Teachers should ask children questions to encourage their listening and writing skills, help them expand their creative themes, provide appropriate guidance to explore their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and continuously develop their abilities while providing corresponding assistance.
Practical Strategies
Teachers provide a supportive environment
According to Outcome 4 of the Australian Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), children are confident and active learners. Therefore, teachers can provide supportive assistance to children and play a key guiding role in children’s drawing. Timely and positive responses from teachers encourage children to express their ideas. Teachers can also ask open-ended questions to guide children to reflect. Additionally, encouragement from teachers can promote the expansion of their drawing ideas, imagination, and creativity, while also improving children’s motor skills to a certain extent. When children come across difficulties in expressing themselves, teachers should listen attentively, kneel down to observe, and use smiles or nods to build their confidence in communication and expression. Appropriate assistance is necessary, allowing children to develop independently and expand their cognitive abilities. Also, new vocabulary or concepts can be introduced during discussions about their work. For example, words such as ‘bright colours’ and ‘birds are singing promote children’s vocabulary accumulation as well as their reading and writing skills, expanding their ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD).
On the other hand, during drawing activities, especially when using paints and watercolours, teachers can consciously guide children to recognise and explore the basic concepts of primary colours and then encourage them to try mixing the colours to discover the process of creating new colours. This not only improves their painting skills but also strengthens their understanding of visual language and visual expression patterns, which enhances their colour cognition on the whole.
Observe and record thoroughly
During painting instruction, teachers should observe and record children’s creative behaviour and expressive content, which is an important way to understand their development. Through observation, teachers can identify each child’s interests, emotional state, language ability, and the developmental stage they are in when children begin to express scenes related to a plot rather than just mere objects. The colours they use and the content of their drawings reveal their emotional state and interests. Therefore, sufficient observation and recording by teachers not only helps them discover children’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) and accordingly provide appropriate teaching scaffolding, but also helps them reflect on their lessons for a better plan. In addition, children’s drawing development trajectories should be recorded to form growth files, which serve as a bridge for communication with parents.
Promoting cultural diversity and peer expression
To explain cultural diversity, teachers can organise parent-child painting days. Such events encourage children to build close connections with their families and understand their own cultural backgrounds. Apart from that, teachers can also encourage children to create works that reflect the festivals and traditions in their cultures, and provide multicultural visual materials (eg, Indian mandalas, Indonesian batik, and Chinese ink paintings) to promote children’s cultural identity. Also, teachers can incorporate indigenous dot painting, finger painting, and natural materials into lessons to help children understand different methods of cultural expression.
Furthermore, teachers can organise group painting activities with peers as a way to enhance children’s participation, cooperation, social interaction, and collective expression. In such activities, children work together around a large sheet of paper or a wall to create an artwork with a specific theme. This also works on an A4-sized piece: when one child finishes, they pass it to the next so that everyone has a chance to express their independent ideas while integrating them with others’ creations. Children develop their listening, negotiation, social skills, and a sense of belonging to the group through collective painting.
Cultural Inclusion and Family Engagement
Art serves as a testament to shared and understood social and cultural traditions, fostering relationships that shape children’s sense of identity and belonging. (Watson & Roy, 2018) Therefore, teachers can use such approaches during the painting process to deepen children’s social understanding and cultural identity. Australia, as a diverse country, has many children who grow up in non-English-speaking families, or who grow up in English-speaking families need to communicate with those from non-English-speaking families. Therefore, it is necessary for children in Australia to understand the cultural backgrounds of different contexts. In the EYLF, the outcomes mention that ‘Children have a strong sense of identity.’ This implies that children should be encouraged to construct their own sense of identity in a safe, open, and diverse environment, which requires teachers to create such an environment. As an open-form expression, drawing allows them to convey and explore their cultural identity without language barriers by providing children with symbolic language tools, allowing children to express their cultural background, life experiences, or family stories by using various images. This type of practice enhances their understanding of ‘who they are’ and helps them comprehend others’ cultural backgrounds, fostering respect for differences.
On the other hand, promoting family participation is also crucial. As the closest environment where children interact and obtain information, parents and teachers play a vital role in the formation of children’s cultural identity, information acquisition, and social understanding. Therefore, by incorporating family activities into painting activities, educators can better understand children’s backgrounds and provide them with more culturally relevant support.
Earl, M. N. (n.d.). Aboriginal style drawing [Artwork]. Retrieved from Aboriginal Painting Techniques | NAIDOC Week | CleverPatch - Art & Craft Supplies
Teaching Strategies for Diversity and Family Participation
Teachers may organise activities where parents are invited for a day to draw with their children collaboratively, and children are encouraged to create paintings that reflect family traditions or cultural backgrounds, such as different festivals or daily life. Such activities strengthen the emotional bond between parents and children. Moreover, family culture is represented in collective learning, which significantly enhances children’s cultural identity and sense of belonging.
In drawing activities, teachers can provide a variety of cultural symbols, images, and artistic styles as references for children to understand and better express the visual language of different cultures. For instance, teachers can guide children to observe and create traditional symbols or elements from a certain country, such as Indian mandalas, folk murals, Indonesian batik patterns, or Chinese ink paintings and shadow puppets, which also teaches them to identify different cultural elements.
For another example, teachers can try to incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures into their teaching. Through drawing dot painting, children can learn how Aboriginal people use symbols and colours to record the stories of their ancestors. Teachers can also collect natural materials like tree leaves and branches in advance, then provide children with these materials in class to create artworks. Using indigenous symbols to construct a story and tell it to children can help them immerse themselves in the worldview of these cultural groups through visual communication and storytelling based on indigenous cultural creations.
Reference list
Adoniou, M. (2013). Drawing to support writing development in English language learners. Language and Education, 27(3), 261–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2012.704047
Dinham, J., & Chalk, B. (2018). It’s arts play: Young children belonging, being and becoming through the arts. (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Eisner, E. W. (1979). The Contribution of Painting to Children’s Cognitive Development. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 11(2), 109–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027790110202
Gov. (2023). Fine arts (emergent literacy) | Victorian Government. Www.vic.gov.au. https://www.vic.gov.au/literacy-teaching-toolkit-early-childhood/teaching-practices-emergent-literacy/fine-arts-emergent
Watson, K., & Roy, D. (2018, November 13). The Arts in the K-2 classroom: Belonging, Being and Becoming. Teacher Magazine. https://www.teachermagazine.com/au_en/articles/the-arts-in-the-k-2-classroom-belonging-being-and-becoming
