Yesterday, while walking my pugs I saw these chalk drawings. I love how you can see what the adult has drawn and what the child has drawn. The bottom picture is a “mandala” – the first symbolic representation children draw. They are often circular with lines intersecting the edges, looking like rudimentary suns. Sometimes, children’s mandalas are triangular, sometimes crosses. For children, these are the elements that provide practice for drawing more sophisticated representations later. They are also the foundation for creating numbers and letters. If you ask children about their drawings they will often report that they represents “people”-circles representing heads or torsos, and lines representing legs and arms. As these become more sophisticated, children may add more circles and lines, to represent the mouth, they eyes, the nose and the ears. I love these early drawings and the early ability to create and identify shapes.