The problem of suitability of artistic work in preschoolage children

Aesthetic education in pre-school age, especially education through a work of art, is not sufficiently conscious and systematic. The endeavour to enhance and deepen it gives rise to the question to what extent one can go in the system of Nursery School occupations when working with the same picture material. As in practice doubts have been raised about the suitability of Stmadel’s artistic creation to children of pre-school age, an experiment has been made with Antonin Strnadel’s leporello and Josef Lada’s book of pictures. The experiment was made with two groups of older children (five and six year old) from two Nursery Schools.
A system of different occupations was elaborated in which the children always worked for a period of 20—25 minutes with the same pictures. First they got to know them in detail in two talks, then they spoke about them, described them by heart (shopkeeper-customer play), asked one another puzzles about the contents of the pictures, they painted them by heart and said what they liked about the pictures. Special attention was given to the extent and the character of those phenomena and the relations which the children had failed to understand in the pictures.
The comparison between the work of both artistic creations (six pictures by each painter) showed that Strandel’s leporello was comprehensible for five and six-year-old children: their talking about the pictures, the completeness of their ideas in both oral and creative expression, their appreciative judgments and their predilection didv not show any substantial differences between the work with Lada’s pictures and those of Strandel. The greater wealth of phenomena represented in Strandel’s pictures and the character of his artistic expression justify the opinion that the childrfen’s positive attitude to Lada’s creation is formed more quickly, to Strandel’s in greater detail, whereas Strandel’s creation arrests the children’s attention more permanently than that of Lada.