Drawing or writing the circle: an investigation into the cognitive potential of art

This article explores how art activities like drawing and painting encourage spontaneous learning processes in young children. Seven works by first-graders (children aged 56 years old) are analysed in terms of efforts they made to assimilate symbols such as letters, numbers and other non-art elements, into the drawing process. Their unconventional use of grammatical and numerical symbols is explained as an innate strategy for making sense of the new and the unknown. Displacing them from their original fields of knowledge and using them in the context of an action plan enabled greater control. In conclusion, this article stresses the importance of art as a subject that encourages and promotes a self-initiated multimodal learning process that integrates early schooling experience.