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Young children create poems, digital photographs, and other artistic creations that reveal the cognitive work, imaginative play, and problem solving that comes as they learn to see themselves as artists.
Wreck1
The sailors prayed to come to land
And their good ship's wreck soon made it,
And sat on the rocks like a one-man band
While the stormy sea still played it.
Now through many a winter's weathers
Many a summer hour
Under the cliff there blooms and withers
The sea's rare-rust flower.
One collection of poetry by Ted Hughes (1999)-the late Poet Laureate of Britain-is titled The Mermaids Purse. In 28 lovely poems, the secret surprises of the sea swirl around the wreck. The octopus waves, the eel grins, and the whelk wonders, while gulls glance overhead dipping and diving above the spray. Creatures sing their sea-soaked poetry, from the stones on the beach, to the crabs in their tide pools, to the sea monster rising suddenly above the surface. In reality, a mermaid's purse refers to the egg cases of skates and sharks, but in Hughes's imagination, a shark leaps from the mermaid's handbag to cure her headache by taking her head.
That Hughes would devote an entire book to the sea makes sense, for England is, as Shakespeare penned in Richard II, "This scepter'd isle .... This precious stone set in the silver sea." The fact that the collection is a children's book also makes sense, for young poets are as drawn to the sea as old masters. In this piece, I explore the multimodal poems, digital photographs, and three-dimensional artistic creations of very young children who live by the sea. Encouraged by their teachers and adult artists, the children learned to look closely at the sign systems of art and poetry to open up worlds of image creation and metaphor making.
SERIOUS SEEING
What do very young children know of images and the words they generate? Research in visual meta-cognition (Flavell, 2004) suggests that infants quickly learn to follow their caregiver's gaze, knowing that an object of interest will result. They direct and check the gaze of adults, pointing to an object and then looking back to make sure the adult is following their focus. Finally, infants understand social referencing,...