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For their presentation at the 2005 World Forum on Early Care and Education in Montreal, Roxana Salazar and Maria Carmen Schulze from Bolivia produced a booklet, Drawing with Children under Six Years Old. This publication has been reprinted by the World Forum Foundation, thanks to a generous World Forum sponsorship by HighReach Learning. This wondrously illustrated 20-page booklet, written in Spanish and English, describes how children can be encouraged to draw even in a poverty context using available natural materials. In a section on the booklet on “Manifestations of Art” the authors observe:

“Any person to who nature has given a mouth, nose, brain, eyes, ears, hands, and feet is well equipped for an artistic linkage. Art should not be considered to be a privilege for a few ‘exceptionally gifted’ individuals. Neither should it be the privilege reserved for adults. There is a difference between being a child and an adult. Being a child implies being rich in potential, pure and free from the competition and biases of the adult world. Despite age limitations, undeveloped technical skills, insecurity, and vulnerability, children are gifted with individual potential that should develop as they grow and mature. But there have to be social interactions and environmental stimuli to facilitate the expression of ideas, through drawing or painting, for example.

“As artistic image is not only a product of perception; it is also something in which finding forms repeats itself as a constant exercise. Children draw lines up and down, round and round, and again, up and down and round and round. In as much as children practice with forms to represent what they perceive, they also connect themselves, through art, to their own experiences. When they draw or redraw, paint or repaint forms, sketches, lines, dots or circles, they are learning, making visible observations they have stored as mental processes.”

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