Birth to three matters - Communities and Local Government

young children and the affective nature ofthe world of babies and young children insafe, shared contexts. What artists do is totake what we know or see, feel or hear, andactively experiment (Gopnik et al 1999),transforming that knowledge throughtheir creations – and babies and childrendo this too. As Bruce (2001:4) suggests:-The imagination makes images in themind. Creativity is the process by whichchildren turn these images into creations.They try out ideas, feelings andrelationships in their role play or pretendplay or find things to be used as playprops…In the context of play, creativityis more of a process than a product.’REPRESENTING THROUGH MARK MAKING‘Children want to write… They mark upwalls, pavements newspapers withcrayons, chalk, pens or pencils…Anythingthat makes a mark. The child’s marks say,“I am”.‘ (Graves 1983:3)Babies’ fingers and hands, as we have seen,are used to feel, to touch, to explore,to point, to reach and then to wave orgesture. In their movements, cruising andexplorations, materials with which to makemarks are often accidentally found, testedand enjoyed. For example, as soon as solidfood and drink is introduced ,babies canbe seen to pour drinks onto surfaces andtrail their fingers through it and dip fingersinto food, not only to use their fingers astools for feeding but also to tracepathways and investigate trails and tracks.Physical traces of babies and youngchildren are often to be found, before theuse of pens, pencils, crayon and paint, onsurfaces, walls and fabrics and before thesymbolic nature of mark making that weknow as literacy is discovered. What ishappening, however, is that very youngchildren soon discover ‘internationality’,that is the desire to make a mark, to‘signify’ and to produce an effect. Thepleasurable effect of such tactile events isalso felt by adults, as they too trail fingersin sand, tracing patterns or shapes orindeed doodle or idle with pens or pencils,letting minds wander and allowing oftennon representational shapes to develop.Making marks, ‘leaving my mark’, has oftenbeen described as a basic human desireand function,leaving signposts orsignifiers of our existence.Parents and carers are often quick to seizeon such marks made by infants andinterpret them as having significancealthough,while such marks are clearlyimportant, imposing representationalsignificance at this stage would beincorrect. However, in western societies,children are growing and learning in printrich and print significant cultures and veryquickly young children becomeencultured into sign making activities.Also, as children begin to develop anability to conceptualise the abstract natureof language, the next stage, Vygotsky’s‘second order symbolism’ (1978) begins totake shape. As Kress explains, ‘alphabeticcultures demand that children change tackfrom their route which relates voice withimage, which is plausible to them, to theroute of the alphabet, which relates sound96 EDUCATIONAND SKILLS B I RT H T O T H R E E M AT T E R S