ABSTRACT
As an early-years worker and an adult who considers myself unable to draw, I am interested in how young children, making marks, are influenced by the adults around them. How can the attitudes and responses of these adults support them in positive ways and what has gone wrong when a child gives up painting and drawing and grows up to believe that she ‘cannot draw’? In this chapter, I wish to explore how a child can be offered an environment rich with opportunities to encourage her to make marks. I will do this by examining my observations of one child making marks and by evaluating my responses to her actions in the light of relevant research. I will define making marks as drawing or any other action which leaves a visible mark on a material. All children have a compulsion to make marks; whatever their culture they have a desire to leave a record, whether it be with crayons on paper, with a stick in the earth or with any other materials available to them. Making visual representations in this way is vital to a young child’s development, both as a means of selfexpression and because experience of symbolic representation is needed by the child as she actively tries to make sense of the world around her. We live in a symbolic world in which abstract symbolic representation in the form of written, spoken and sign language are central to our communication with each other.
