In recent years we have come to accept the idea that certain things are best taught at certain ages. We have a reading readiness age, and an age when tables are most easily taught. In the same way we have certain stages of development in the art work of Primary school children, which it is wise to consider in planning work for them.

The first and earliest stage in beginning to draw is what may be called scribble. This is largely an exploration of the movements required to make particular marks on paper and it can be compared to the exploration of sounds which precedes speech. It is really quite an important stage and it is very necessary to allow children to explore it fully, giving them opportunity to scribble with other things besides pencil, such as paint, used with brush, sponge and fingers, chalk and pastel. A similar stage exists in crafts, particularly in work with clay, where children go through a stage of playing with the material before they attempt to make anything. Many children are through this stage before they come to school, particularly if they have had the advantage of attending a nursery school, but many spend the first weeks at school exploring in this way, and it is important that we allow for this.

Gradually, as the child connects movement and marks on the paper more fully, he learns to repeat certain shapes—just as the baby learning to talk repeats certain sounds. At this stage he may draw a shape and then say "This is a man" or "This is a house". Interest in certain shapes and shape-relationships emerge and these appear again and again in a person's work, often much later in his life and often disguised in other forms. The shapes which grow immediately from the scribble stage are personal to the individual child, but as he feels himself more fully part of the group he uses a group symbolism. He starts to draw the four-square house and the dish-mop tree which are so familiar in the drawings of young children. These, if you think about it, have very little to do with the appearance of the things themselves; they are merely adopted symbols. In particular we have the symbol for a person. This usually starts with a drawing of a circle with features, legs and arms. It then progresses to a drawing of two circles, one for the head and one for the body. Gradually details are added and eventually at the age of nine or ten, children discover the profile.

In a school where children have sufficient opportunity for drawing and painting and are encouraged to make pictures of their own, in their own way, they soon begin to draw more personally. Although drawings throughout the Infant stage are usually of the children's environment, they are not yet based on the visual appearance of things, but on what they know to be there. The sky is above us and the earth below—so we draw one at the top of the paper and the other at the bottom. Houses are often drawn transparently, showing both inside and outside in the same picture. This way of drawing from total knowledge rather than from observation of the visual world; of using experience of what something feels like to touch, how it moves, and what its most obvious characteristics are, rather than attempting to draw what is before the eyes, continues well into the Junior school. Gradually children begin to observe the visual world more fully and to draw what they see rather than what they know. Interest in detail grows; figures are drawn in profile as well as full face and many details of costume and appearance are now put in with care. This is the stage at which children can be encouraged to go and look before drawing; the stage for encouraging visual observation and the use of that observation in pictures and designs.

Almost at the end of the Junior school, there comes to some children a first dawning of perception of a third dimension and of perspective. Junior children in general show little sense of depth in their pictures, and just as it seems to me to be a mistake to persuade them at an earlier stage to make sky and earth join, so I think it is a mistake to persuade them to represent depth in their pictures at this stage, unless they start inquiring about it. They will be ready for this knowledge at a later stage and will then absorb it far more easily.

In craftwork the pattern of development is similar. We start with exploration of the materials and the movements which control them and gradually move on to more careful, more controlled and more detailed work. Modelling is a craft which shows a very close parallel to drawing in its development. Crafts such as bookmaking, weaving, woodwork and needlework cannot by their nature show this sort of development. What we see here is a gradual increase of skill and a growing ability to perform more complex operations.

The pattern I have given is that of average development. As in other fields of knowledge, there are quick developers and slow developers. As in other subjects, the intelligent child may be above average in development and the less intelligent child below average, but this will not necessarily be so. Creative ability and the kind of intelligence measured by intelligence tests would seem to have little correlation. Sometimes a child who has difficulty in expressing himself verbally needs the outlet that drawing, painting and modelling give him and so his work develops more rapidly than that of the more verbal child. The intelligent child will, of course, use his experience to help himself and this will help his progress, but one should certainly have no preconceived ideas about children's ability in this subject in relation to their progress in English and arithmetic. One factor, however, comes into backwardness in art and craft, which rarely comes into backwardness in reading or arithmetic. When a child comes new into a school at a late stage, one cannot be certain that he has had any teaching at all in this subject. If he has had no teaching he may need to pass rapidly through some of the early stages, although he may well have made some progress by himself.