Playful Symbol Use With Three- to-Five Year Olds

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Between the ages of about three to five years of age, children learn to use symbols through play and fantasy. During this period—which Gardner (1991) called the symbolic period—children learn to understand and use language to ask for things, to tell others what they want, and to request information. They also use language for more expressive purposes, such as telling jokes, teasing, making up or retelling stories, role-playing, or developing friendships. In addition to words, children communicate in a number of other ways:

• Graphically, for example, through drawing or painting (such as the tadpole humans, houses, and trees described earlier), through using other two-dimensional media (e.g., collages, printmaking), or through working with three-dimensional art forms (such as sculpting with clay, constructing with boxes, or building with blocks)
• Dramatically, for example, through role play (taking on a role, such as pouring imaginary tea and eating imaginary biscuits while talking on the phone); body expression and gesture (movements of the hands, arms, shoulders, or full body that express or emphasize an idea or attitude); facial expressions (such as a grimace or frown); language (such as developing play characters and "scripts" of events); and the use of open-ended resources (such as placing a towel on the head to represent long hair, or wearing hat, caps, and other dressup props)
• Musically, for example, through composing or improvising (e.g., creating "soundscapes") using vocal effects and the timbre of musical instruments and uncoventional sound sources (e.g., shrill, fluid, hollow) and the expressive properties of singing and playing styles (e.g., flowing, calm, jerky, or energetic)
• Through movement and dance, for example, depicting a character, object, or scene from their imaginations or stimulated by another source, such as a story or book (e.g. "The Monster Romp" from Where the Wild Things Are), moving expressively to music, working out a set of movements for a dance, or using their bodies to represent an idea or feeling

Ability in visual media has now caught up to preschool/kindergarten children's capacity to tell a story, sing a song, create a dance, role play, and "read" a picture. They can use lines, space, shape, and color to construct a variety of visual concepts and create complex designs, and they understand that lines can stand for the edges of objects. They can draw, sculpt, and model recognizable forms and label their products accordingly. While drawing, painting, building with blocks or cardboard boxes, shaping clay, or creating collages, young children use visual images to symbolize objects and events. They imagine, fantasize, and act out thoughts and feelings while fashioning their worlds in the plastic domain. Gardner (1980), Golomb (1992), Goodnow (1977), Kellogg (1969), Matthews (1994a, b, 1997), Smith (1993), and Wright (2001b) provide a comprehensive description of the presymbolic and symbolic drawings that young children produce when becoming users of visual symbols. By the end of the third year, their prototypes of houses, animals, and people are now recognizable to adults. In addition, the "aggregates" (combinations of shapes) that were rehearsed when they were toddlers, such as the mandala, may be used for windows of a house or the eyes of a person.