Key question:
How to create a course for children aged 5-10 in which drawing –as a way of unfolding manual skills in an individual way– becomes a medium of concrete narrative exchange?

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Conditions:
Childcare professionals are noticing that children are less and less able to talk freely about their experiences at younger and younger ages. There is also the problem of motor skills. Manual dexterity also declines significantly or is not developed to the extent required.

From a creative point of view, these two skills are inseparable. In order to promote a child's development in a sustainable way, it is therefore necessary to develop pedagogical concepts that allow children to develop both skills in a playful and enjoyable way.

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Group to activate:
Drawing course for children from 5 to 10 years (hled in German and English). As we attach great importance to individual support and inclusion, the number of participants is limited to 12.

The course is led by a specialist lecturer from the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt, supported by three students from the upper semesters.

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Methodical Approach:
”Lines that laugh and crash, sing and flash” – We draw with basic shapes that are playfully and freely assembled, then concretized (that is...) and finally interpreted together. Drawing thus becomes a medium of concrete narrative exchange.

For children, drawing is a form of communication that is acquired at the same time as the ability to speak, walk and grasp objects. We build on these early skills.

The child's early drawings do not aim at a true-to-life reproduction of the visual, but follow a formal-grammatical structure (called visual grammar in continuation of Gestalt theorie), which enables the child to semiotically grasp the experience and thus both to process it for itself and to communicate it to others.

For the child's development, it is not initially important to grasp what it sees graphically, but rather what it experiences as a sensory affection that stimulates the nervous system, i.e., neurophysiologically. In doing so, it makes use of formal elements that develop into numerical, textual or pictorial symbols.

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Occupational field:
Design in Education