Have you ever watched a child draw? 

 

It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it? 

From the very beginning of their lives, children have a natural inclination to pick up a pen or crayon and start creating. It’s as if they have an innate sense of the power of self-expression through art.

As a parent, grandparent, or caregiver, you may have already noticed how drawing can captivate a child’s attention for hours. But did you know that it offers many benefits as well? 

Drawing can help children develop their motor skills, enhance their cognitive development, and promote creativity, just to name a few.

Imagine a group of children gathered around a table, each with a blank sheet of paper and a set of crayons in their hands. As soon as the first stroke hits the paper, their faces light up with excitement and wonder. This is the magic of drawing, something that every child instinctively loves to do. Drawing is not just a fun activity for kids, it also has countless benefits that can help them grow and develop in many ways.

1.Developing Motor Abilities

Improving motor skills starts from drawing and it is very important in strengthening our hands and muscles. When drawing, the small muscles in children’s hands and fingers start to strengthen while providing exercises to the large muscles in your arm. This is how a child starts to strengthen their muscles to write and to do other stuff with their hands later on.

 

2.Fostering Creativity 

You must have seen children using different colours and methods to draw what they see and have heard about . This shows their creative talents which are very helpful later on in their lives. Their creative talents are initiated when they start to draw and the more they draw the more their creativity would increase.

 

3.Enhancing Cognitive Growth

Cognitive Development is a very important stage in the development of a person’s life. However, many people do not know the fact that drawing can immensely assist the cognitive development. Drawing mainly contributes to cognitive development by developing argumentative thinking as in what colour you should use and what shape you should give to a particular thing that you have only heard about. The colour combination is also very helpful in cognitive development. All these qualities are developed mainly through drawing.

 

4.Building Planning Skills

Many people fail in their lives due to the lack of planning skills but if you encourage your kid to draw, they will eventually build up great planning skills. From the beginning of a drawing, they should plan how things are going to work on the drawing starting from drawing the pictures, arranging the order of the picture, colouring them, and using outlines for the pictures.

 

5.Improving Eye-Hand Coordination

 

Drawing is basically an interaction between the eye and hand. Eye-hand Coordination is very important for our day-to-day lives and we start to learn this skill through drawing. You start to co-ordinate what you see with your eyes and use your hands to draw it. The resulting coordination is highly important in sports, handwriting, reading, buttoning, and tying shoes etc.

 

6.Developing Visual Perception

 

At a very young age, we start to recognise things through visuals, and we try to reflect them through our drawings. We get to access each visual we see and that is how we draw them according to different sizes, colours, shapes, and lots of other criteria. That is why we notice some children going into minor details in their drawings, which is very important in life.

 

7.Lengthening Attention Span

Many children have difficulties in paying attention to certain things for a longer time. However, drawing makes us pay attention to one task for a long period. This gives the idea that when things are interesting for the child they tend to pay attention very carefully and we have to follow such creative methods if we want to take the attention of the kids to teach them or make them learn something.

 

8.Encouraging Healthy Emotional Release and Expression

 

There is no doubt that you have seen lots of kids releasing their pain or sadness through drawings and it is one of the best ways for them to express their feelings and emotions . There are lots of instances in the world where parents and adults have discovered harassments done to children through their drawings. So, if you feel like your kid is not in a very good status of mind, it is very beneficial to make them focus on drawing as it would reveal lots of hidden things and make them release their emotions.

 

9.Advancing Language Proficiency

Drawing is the language that the kids speak or use to express themselves at a very young age . Moreover, even if they are grown up, drawing helps them to express things that they cannot express through words. So, it is the responsibility of the parents and the guardians to pay close attention to what your kids are drawing as it can express thousands of things that they do not speak through words.

 

10.Stimulating Imagination

 

Kids have no limitations when they draw and that is how drawing helps them to improve imagination. You must have seen little kids creating their own characters and fantasy worlds through drawing. This is a good sign that they have an improved imagination. Moreover, children do not bother to use the standard colours and pictures when they draw whichis why we can see blue cats ,humans with four hands, and smilar things that do not exist in reality.

 

11.Cultivating Problem-Solving Abilities

Problem solving is also a main benefit kids get through drawing, and you might wonder how they do that. Deciding what should be included into the picture, where they should be placed, and what colours they should use to are some of the initial stages where children learn to solve problems through drawing. As they mature, you can see them using drawings to solve other problems they have.

 

12.Nurturing Pre-Writing Skills

 

There is a reason why we let kids start drawing before writing. Drawing helps to build up lots of prewriting skills and it is essential to develop these pre writing skills such as using fingers, hands, arms, and shoulder strength, hand dominance, pencil grasp, interpreting and making sense of images, manipulation of objects, and eye-hand coordination through drawing. These are essential skills that a child should develop before starting to write.

 

13 .Bolstering Pre-Mathematical Skills

 

You might be wondering how pre-maths skills are developed through drawing. But if you pay close attention, you can realise how children get the idea of symmetry when drawing objects and that would help them develop cognitive skills. Moreover, they start to recognise numbers through pictures and when you ask them to draw a certain number of pictures, you can understand that they have the notion of numbers already within them. 

 

14.Strengthening Memory Retention

Drawing is a very good exercise to improve memory as children tend to draw what they have seen or experienced. This is very visible as many children start to draw after you come home from a journey for a day out with them. They also capture the minor details which show their memory skills that are developed through drawing.

 

15. Improving Social Skills

 

There are lots of ways that drawing can help to improve social skills. Most of the time, when children get to know new friends, they like to draw with them which helps them to communicate and share ideas with each other. Sometimes, you can also give them instructions to draw a particular picture which would help them to follow an order and improve listening skills.

 

Final Thoughts

 

So, the next time you see a child with a drawing pad and a pencil, take a moment to appreciate the magic that’s happening before your eyes. 

Encourage them to keep drawing and exploring their creative side. 

Who knows?  They may even discover a hidden talent that could change their lives forever.