From Play to Drawing: An Analysis of Children's Pictorial Representation of Play Experience in the Context of Anji Play

Abstract

: The play story drawing segment in Anji Play is a crucial process through which children transform dynamic physical experiences into visual representations. However, in practice, teachers tend to focus on listening to children's narratives while overlooking the cognitive significance embedded in the pictorial forms themselves. Adopting a qualitative research paradigm, this study takes a senior class in an Anji Play kindergarten as the main sample, with middle and junior classes as comparative samples. Four types of data—drawings, play videos, dictated texts, and field notes—were collected to investigate three core issues: children's selective focus in their drawings, their creative spatial schemas, and age-related developmental differences. The findings reveal that children do not replicate the entire play process; instead, they selectively represent peak moments such as sliding impacts and shifts in the center of gravity. By employing strategies like tilted composition, X-ray perspective drawing, and temporal juxtaposition, they creatively transform physical experiences. Clear developmental stages emerge across junior, middle, and senior classes in terms of narrative structure and spatial organization, with senior-class children already able to represent virtual modalities and psychological expectations. The study confirms that these unconventional drawing schemas are not cognitive errors stemming from immaturity, but rather proactive solutions children generate when faced with complex representational tasks. Accordingly, it is proposed that teachers shift from merely listening to narratives about drawings to a professional paradigm of reading forms and discerning cognition, establish a triadic interpretation mechanism integrating play videos, drawings, and dictated texts, and incorporate innovative representational strategies into child development assessment systems. This provides a theoretical basis and practical pathways for identifying deep learning and offering precise teacher support in Anji Play.