This book focuses on the value of drawing as an important meaning-making tool for young children and a mode of communication for young children.

Taking a social semiotics perspective, we investigate children’s representations around their social and cultural interests. Using 223 drawings from an original study, we examine and explain the ordinariness and the extraordinariness in children’s everyday drawings.  We explore how young children use drawings to make and communicate meaning, their drawing processes, the modes they use to create their drawings, and the themes and meanings that emerge from those drawings.  Original case study material illuminates the complexity of children’s thought, design, and determination as they find creative and individual ways to convey their thoughts, fears, excitements, contentment and fascinations.  We also explore the relationship between drawing and talk, and how children’s ongoing drawing-narratives help them to develop and adapt their meanings as they draw.  

From a children’s rights standpoint, the book promotes the use and value of drawing as a mode for children to meaningfully communicate what intrigues and concerns them, and shows how drawing can lead to a valuable pedagogical approach. Uniquely, the book presents an original tool to analyse children’s drawings, which can also be adapted to understand how children make use of other media (such as construction play) to communicate what they know and understand as well as how they feel and what they imagine. The book also contributes to international research and practice focusing on young children as participants in their own learning. It provides an example of how research can be conducted with young participants, how their opinions and voices can be respected in research processes, and how ethical issues can be identified and positively navigated.

Providing an authentic, in-depth account of the form and content in young children’s drawings at home and in their early years setting, the book opens up an understanding of children’s funds of knowledge, and how such knowledge can be used by parents and early years educators to validate and extend children’s learning. In linking research and practice the book provides educational professionals with a deeper understanding of how understanding of children’s experiences, and thinking can be used to inform curriculum planning, pedagogical practice and assessment of children’s knowledge and understanding of their worlds. It further demonstrates how, provided with more information about the importance of drawing parents support children’s drawing activity and extend the drawing opportunities they offer their children at home. 

The book shows how insights gained from understanding children as they draw, can be used to enhance children’s lives and learning, as adults sensitively interpret what young children are trying to say and use those insights to facilitate young children’s holistic living, development and learning. Combining accessible and relevant theories with numerous original examples, the book provides readers with an insightful approach to understanding children’s drawings and shows how drawing is inextricably linked with children’s everyday experiences, their thinking processes, their emotions, their rights, and their learning; in other words, who they are.