Page:First steps in mental growth (1906).djvu/73

 in large part the poor showing little children make in drawing.

Sixth Stage.—Beginning to copy models. An interesting theoretic question is, When does it first occur to a child that mere scratching and aimless scribbling is not really making the thing he says he is making? When does he begin to compare critically his own pencilings with the copy—either the real object or the copy set for him by others—and see that his own drawings or pencilings are unlike the models? When does he discover that swinging the pencil back and forth, round and round does not produce a thing like the copy? Put otherwise, when does the idea of representation begin to influence his marking? and when does he cease making conventional figures—circles, for example, to represent all sorts of objects? and when does he begin to make different figures to represent different objects? In looking through R.'s drawings for answers to these questions, one is unable to find anything to suggest that he tried to follow the copy before the first week of the twenty-ninth month, or that he showed any disposition to break away from the circular motion, the dominant one for all kinds of figures at that time. In the week named, he made a series of vertical lines in four different attempts to copy a triangle which had been drawn for him. But even this