Communication and expression are the ways in which young children demonstrate their response
to what they see, hear and experience. Creative expression is how a child represents themselves
their thoughts feelings and ideas. There is the potential for very young children to be
highly involved, for long periods of time, in expressive activities if the quality of
what they see and hear encourages this. So in thinking about the importance of communicating
through arts and expression, what we're really considering is the way in which children
show us creatively their thoughts and feelings even before they're able to use verbal language
and speak in the way they come and interact with the activities and the materials and the offer
that we give. The way that children interact with materials, so they're not necessarily using sort
of verbal communication but they're communicating to the adult or other children in the way
that they interact with materials, use them, place them together. It's sort of a very rich
source of information I guess, in terms of what they're thinking about and how they're feeling and
what their interests are. Through music and like listening to that sort of like, a wide genre of
music, not always verbally talking about how they feel when they hear that piece of music, but just
sometimes how they move with their bodiesso it's like an expression of movement rather than them
saying something verbally to me about it. So when we're thinking about communicating and expressing
ourselves through the arts, one of the things we're also thinking about is that future vocabulary
that we're building, and the experiences and connections that we're allowing children to make,
that support them then to become much more expressive and much more able to communicate,
through their movements, through the actions that they make, but also through language,
and the way in which we are providing a rich vocabulary around the work that we do.
And we're looking at offering children words so even before children are able to use language and
to verbally express themselves, we are providing words alongside what they're looking at. And
I know that happens a little bit with the found materials doesn t it? Yeah,
very much so. Introducing materials, found materials or materials that the children might not
have experienced or come across, definitely sort of inspires sort of a need to express and find a
way of describing what they're experiencing. That aspect of communicating and expressing
through arts, where children begin to make marks, thinking about that really from even when they're
very young, and they're able to sort of make marks by pressing the clay. But that interest in
something they do and the movement they make, being able to make a mark that's more permanent,
is sort of something that really links into all of the work that we do. Certainly with music,
Lizzie, there's so many opportunities aren't there where you can encourage mark-making alongside all
of the movement? Quite often listening to the music, listening to different genres of music
and then asking the children to talk about how they feel when they hear the music. And then
the other week I got big pieces of black paper and chalks and they were making marks as they heard
the music, so we just got big pieces all together. Some of them are up on the wall actually over
there. I was able to sit around with them all as we all sort of sat round the paper. We started to
look at the marks and trace our finger over some of the marks, and they were able to talk about
when we were listening to some music that they thought was happy music they then
they were saying I drew kisses Lizzie , I felt happy. And they were sort of like squiggles and
swirls. The movements become marks. But, actually, some of it's representational
isn't it? So it's that movement from just mark-making to representational mark-making.
Adults working beside children who are exploring creatively have the opportunity to offer a rich
dialogue, narrating the experience and offering new vocabulary that will support language
acquisition and extend a young child's ability to communicate expressively. Children are naturally
curious, from birth, and will respond expressively to what they see, hear, feel and experience.
Creative experiences lay the foundation for other forms of learning as they support children to
respond to and engage with the world around them, to understand the properties of materials and
their shape, form and uses both real and imagined. Children communicate something of themselves
in their response to creative experiences, sharing their interests, feelings and thoughts
as they respond, and communicating even before they have acquired verbal language skills.