Drawing medium format and artistic response of children aged 3 to 6 years

Authors of The Kindergarten Curriculum (1999) wrote that »art enables children to realize their creative potential, which is expressed in their creative exploring and learning about the world« (Bahovec D et al., 1999, p. 37), and it is up to adults to provide children with diverse experience. In the theoretical part of the paper, titled Drawing Medium Format and Artistic Response of Children Aged from 3 to 6 Years, I presented theories of different authors about general characteristics of children's artistic development, specific topics about drawing mediums, the significance of adults’ creativity for children and their possibility to provide and encourage different experience as well as the significance of freedom of expression, which starts with adults. Particular attention was devoted to artistic education in the preschool period. I also described mediums of artistic information – which types there are, what their impact is, how they are used by children and what the significance of their use is. In the empirical part, I studied, based on observation sheets and rating scales, how and in what way children react to unusual formats of drawing mediums which do not reflect something that already exists. It was determined that these fictional and randomly cut formats encourage children's imagination, creative freedom and intertwinement of mental connections. Children were noticed to memorise the perceived format of drawing mediums, and by drawing, they determined their content and significance. In doing so, they created recognizable and unrecognizable objects, which children named or even placed in a story. By drawing the selected format on a regular drawing medium (an A4 sheet), some children added more detail to the object, which placed the unusual format of the drawing medium in space and, consequently, in a story