Drawing: A Powerful Tool for Spatial Development

In my new book Exploring the 3D World: Developing Spatial and Math Skills for Young Children, I include a chapter on Visual Representation and emphasize drawing as a powerful tool for developing spatial skills. Sheryl Sorby (1999), an engineering educator, suggests that an important key to enhancing spatial skills is to have students sketch, or do quick drawings, from concrete models that they can actually touch and see, which stimulates the “perceiving” portions of their brain. Similarly, many artists make sketches to study a particular subject or to plan a work of art, scientists do drawings to capture details as they make observations and mathematicians draw to conceptualize an idea.

Drawing also helps us to remember what we learn. Myra Fernandes, Jeffrey Wammes and Melissa Meade, experts in the science of memory, conducted experiments to find out what activities helped students remember information. They found that even when students weren’t skilled artists, those who drew information remembered twice as much as when they wrote it. The researchers explained that drawing taps into visual, kinesthetic and linguistic areas of the brain, so the information is processed in three different ways and therefore establishes more neural connections for deeper learning (Terada, 2019).

One of my observations during my visit to the infant centers and preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy was that even very young children were quite skilled at drawing. Were Italians just more creative than Americans? My conclusion was that they were no different than children here, the children in the Reggio Emilia schools were just given more opportunities to express their ideas by drawing them.

The sophisticated drawings of the young children from the preschools of Reggio Emilia have shown us that we grossly underestimate what children can do with adult guidance. This does not mean that we should replace children’s creative visual expressions with more guided explorations in drawing. You should ensure time for both. But if time is at a premium, the first thing I would eliminate would be coloring books or worksheets that have limited educational value and contribute very little to spatial development. A quote from Ursula Kolbe (2001, 118), author of Rapunzel’s Supermarket, reminds us that “most colouring-in books are a bit like junk food—harmless in moderation but definitely not recommended for a regular diet. Why? Because they don’t assist children in ‘learning to see’ or draw. They may keep hands busy but they rarely provide food for the imagination.”

A great place to start is to invite children to draw what they have created in 3D. In mathematics, dimension shifting is imagining objects or amounts proportionally larger or smaller, which is about understanding scale, proportion, and ratio. For example, when children create buildings to represent actual buildings, they are scaling down from large to small. Another aspect of dimension shifting is the ability to shift from 3D to 2D or from 2D to 3D. An example of this is when children build structures based on a photo, drawing, or blueprint (2D to 3D) or when they represent what they have built in a drawing (3D to 2D). Try this at home or in learning centers at school by offering markers or pencils, paper and an invitation to draw a 3D creation or object.

References

Kolbe, Ursula. 2001. Rapunzel’s Supermarket: All about Young Children and Their Art. Paddington, Australia: Peppinot Press.

Sorby, Sheryl A. 1999. “Developing 3-D Spatial Visualization Skills”. Engineering Design Graphics Journal, 63 (2), 21-32.

Terada, Youki. 2019. The Science of Drawing and Memory. Retrieved at https://www.edutopia.org/article/science-drawing-and-memory.

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