Psychology in Education

This work sample demonstrates the child's knowledge of a fictional text and their ability to represent the characters in a visual form.

Luquet developed three set of stages that children follow when developing their drawing skills: 'Scribbling' (2-4 years), 'Pre-Schematic' (4-7 years) and

'Schematic' (7+ years). The child in this example is in the pre-schematic stage of drawing. There are many detailed objects present, however, the evidence of schema are not present. If the child was in the schematic stage the fish would be in the sea or there would be sand surrounding the fish (Koppitz, 2000).

Drawing is an important part of literacy development. Often children create drawings based upon a scenario or in this case, something they have read. Maehr (1989) says that young children may believe that their drawings are in fact, actual writing. If asked to 'read' their marks, children can give a clear message or story. In this case, if asked, the child could have said that this is the rainbow fish from the story, and followed on from there. Ttherefore drawing does form an aspect of literacy as often drawings accompany text or for young children, drawing is text.

Reading to children is also an important aspect of literacy development. Reading to children allows them to hear how words are pronounced and also allows their imagination to expand. The interactions young children have with literacy materials such as books, paper, and crayons, and with the adults in their lives are the building blocks for language, reading as well as writing development (Zero to Three, 2003).

At the visual level of shape knowledge, children posses the ability to identify shapes according to their appearance (Clements & Battista, 1992, p270-279). This is evident in the above sample as the child was able to draw the shape and then recall its features, such as number of corners and sides.

The child was able to constructs a sentence to convey information about the shape drawn using known letters of the alphabet. The child also displayed a great understanding of letter-to-sound knowledge, as all letters were formed correctly and all words were spelt correctly.

Teachers can scaffold and assist in further learning by providing the student with more difficult tasks in the future, or simply asking them more questions about the shape.

The child in this example, was able to correctly follow instructions from the student teacher to complete the task. The child could correctly form numbers from one to ten and place them in the correct order.

The teacher was able to provide assistance (scaffolding) to the student as required, and the child was able to use the language skills he has acquired to communicate if he did not understand the task or similar. This relates to Skinners theory of Behaviourism and Language Learning, as the child has learnt language to use, like other skills required to be used (Evans, 2005).

The child in this example has created a relevant