The Image on Forests of Preschool Children ? An Example of Middle Area in Taiwan

[[abstract]]In human history, forests are always relevant to the life and the civilization on earth. Forests are not only beneficial to the development of the civilization, it also influences the spiritual development. For example, the politics, economics, society, philosophy, culture and art have been affected by forests either directly or indirectly due to the humanity have been living in the forest for a long time. Therefore, the environment in forests could satisfy both people?s mental and physical necessary. Recently, the studies have been proving that the nature environment is helpful to human nature, especially for younger children. It is mentioned that, the education to preschool children is the most influential period among the process of growing; the education is helpful for developing children?s personality and intelligent. That is to say, the contact with forests is advantageous to improve children?s awareness, social development and observation ability. However, people have different understanding of forests and contribute different point of view on forests. Therefore, preschool children?s imagery on forest was investigated in order to understand their awareness and emotion of forests. The subjects of the research were the preschool children aged from four to seven. There were six kindergartens chosen by random from midland of Taiwan (including Tai-Chung County, Tai-Chung City, Chang-Hua County and Nan-Tou County). The formal test started from 27th of March to 19th of April. There were 181 valid samples among 208 samples. The naturalism in paintings and interview were used as the research methods. The data colleted by these methods were transferred into the quantitative data. The statistics were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, Chi-square test, t-test and one-way ANOVA. The results of the research can be separated into two parts, children?s awareness and emotion on forests. The first part contains: 1. The whole imagery of forests, including most of the creature, non-livings,environment factors, relationships and the activities in the forest. 2. The single contribute of the imagery to forests, including (1) creatures-most of them were mammiferous, birds and insects etc; (2) vegetation-most of them were flowers, grass and trees; (3) human-there was at least one person in the picture of forest; (4) non-living-nests, houses and cars were often shown in the pictures of forest; (5) environment factors- most of the pictures showed the sun, clouds, rain or lake and dirt; (6) relationships-the relationships of food and interdependent between the animals and environment; (7) activities- most of the preschool children believes that they could play games, observe and touch the animals and picnics in the forests. The part of emotion shows: 1. Most of the preschool children feel pleasant in forests; 2. Most of them like forests; 3. However, the rate of the negative feeling on forests is higher than positive feeling. 4.Nevertheless, many of the children indicated, they are willing to go to forests if their parents are with them. Finally, the significant differences of imagery on forests can be seen from the variable of sex, age and location through the methods of ANOVA