What really matters- Scribbling as Action and Motion- The drawings around this age may not be intended to serve as visual     representations.  Instead, they are often scribbles that reflect physical activity.  Researches have called these early  scribbles "gestural representation."  or  “action  representation”.  For instance, a scrawling line might represent the sound of a car or a hopping motion across the page might represent a bunny hopping.  The child may even make the sound of the car as they draw the line. The actual product may not be intended "to be" anything and the resulting "artwork" is often not interesting to children as products, rather they are about the process of making the scribbles.  Children of this age tend to experiment with different kinds of scribbles and  in so doing engage is a series of different types of moves.   For instance, the making of dots involves a sharp pounding activity (and often so much arm movement that not all of the dots end up on the page!)                                                                                                                    

How to put it into practice-

My Experience-

In the “Making Dots” video to the right, Whitney is banging the pen into the table so hard that she made a bunch of indents or even holes in her nice new table (see video). I frequently find a tension between letting Whitney continue on some engaging adventure or trying to reign it in because it is causing damage or is not safe. Here the pen is obviously penetrating the paper and damaging the table so I try to switch whtiney from a pen to a crayon for her dot making, but when she just uses both at the same time, I let go and let her bang away with both hands (mom, has not noticed the holes yet;-)).

Tuning In-

You can tell that she enjoys the rigorous movement of making dots. She is into the forceful swing of her arm and the sharp pound on the table. I of course try to bring her attention to the marks or “dots” she is making. And Whitney does sound out “dots” but it appears she is less interested in the dots than she is the sensation of banging.

Extending/Bridging-

The teachable moment comes just at that time when our toddlers pause to either begin a new round of strokes or to visually inspect the marks.  Your comments can be directed either toward the shape of their action, "You moved your hand very quickly over the paper," or to the resultant mark "Your mark has an interesting curl at the end."  We want to try to match our comments to what we think our toddler is reflecting upon.  At this stage, we don’t want to rush into naming the mark as a representation of real objects or asking our toddlers to name the objects in their drawing.