‘Goodbye,’ said the fox. ‘And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only

with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’

(Saint-Exupéry, 1958, p. 68).

Children making meaning with marks

During the past 30 years there has been a growing interest among teachers and edu-

cators in the meanings children make in a variety of contexts through their explo-

rations in the world. Studies have focused on emergent writing (Bissex, 1980; Clay,

1975; Hall, 1989); children’s schemas (Athey, 1990); drawings, model making and

play with objects (Kress, 1997; Pahl, 1999b); early mark-making, drawing and paint-

ing (Matthews, 1999). Early representations of scientific concepts have also been

explored from this perspective (Driver, Guesne and Tiberghien, 1985). ‘It is’ Vygot-

sky argued, ‘the meaning that is important, not the sign. We can change the sign,

but retain the meaning’ (Vygotsky, 1982, p. 74).

These aspects have been considered both from the child’s current perspective and

in the context of their developing understanding. In other words, as they make

actions, marks, draw, model and play, children make personal meaning. It is the

child’s own meanings that have been the focus of this developing interest, rather

than the child’s outcome of an adult’s planned piece of work, such as copied writing

or representing a person ‘correctly’.

In his long-term study of children at home and at school, Wells (1986) concluded

that children were constantly trying to make sense of their world. Tizard and

Hughes’s (1984) study of 4-year-olds again emphasised the child as a powerful

learner, struggling to make sense of all around him/her. In their studies Donaldson

(1978) and Hughes (1986) both concluded that children responded to situations that

make ‘human sense’: these studies used clinical tasks rather than evidence from

natural contexts. Both of these studies are well recognised as contributing to our

understanding of children’s learning but the tasks were not immediately purposeful

or natural to the children. More recently through clinical studies and interviews

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Making Marks,

Making Meaning

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