ABSTRACT

This chapter describes how dance and drawing, as sign systems, yield infinite variations and subtleties that enable children to ‘say’ things that cannot be expressed in any other way. Indeed, one sign system enriches and informs the other such that meaning becomes clearer as it becomes transmediated across bodily-kinaesthetic, spatial and graphic modalities. Children’s kinaesthetically oriented communication moves beyond the literal to the poetic, expressive and metaphoric, by means of analogy. Adults can support children’s semiosis so that children’s voices and perspectives can be heard as evidence of their views and feelings about their world and their place within it.