Understanding Through Your Hands

This book shows that creativity is so much more than drawing or painting something beautiful. It is a way of understanding the world through your hands and learning through art, play and science.

When children make beautiful drawings, we think it is wonderful. But many adults find it hard to understand what young children are doing when they scribble, smear, or draw endless lines, and why it is so difficult to motivate older children to draw or paint.

This book shows that creativity is so much more than drawing or painting something beautiful. It is a way of understanding the world through your hands and learning through art, play and science.

Drawing on the Reggio Emilia approach (among others), this book focuses on the process rather than the result and argues that children should be supported in experimenting with materials and mark-making. The authors go against traditional setups where an adult demonstrates how it should be done, showing instead that an inspiring environment and open-ended resources trigger children’s intrinsic motivation. The book shows countless inexpensive possibilities, which require little preparation, and get children in a creative flow.

With its appealing full colour photographs, this fully updated English edition offers inspiration, a sustainable and feasible vision, and tools for facilitating creative processes at school, in childcare centres and at home. Full of practical guidance, it is essential reading for anyone working with children wanting to help them develop into self-aware, creative, and responsible people.