Stages Of Creative Development: How To Use Storyboarding To Track Student Progress

Art teachers! Teach the stages of drawing with cute, moveable, paper puppets: How to use storyboarding to assess creative development!

Printable Animal Puppets for your teaching supply library.

You are pretty awesome, you know! You’ve made it into the classroom but now you may need resources. Whether you are looking for science or art activities for kindergarten, or you need cross-curricular activities for your grade 4 art class, storyboarding with Tracimal paper puppets will give you insight into how your students are developing along Viktor Lowenfeld’s Stages of Creative Development

My Storyboard Story

Did you learn about the stages of drawing, or creative development in children when you were at teacher’s college? Chances are, if you were like me, you left teacher’s college with more pressure to learn how to teach math and language than visual art. Yet, for so many students that have a natural spatial visual intelligence, as the multiple intelligences theory explains, students are often discouraged by their results in other subjects.

I invented Tracimals, which are the printable, paper puppets you see in the images. At least, I gave the concept a glow-up and have found many great cross curricular lesson plans to go with them.

Two years ago in a grade 1 French Immersion class. We had so much fun with them. We used them to make a big Social Studies community map with the teachers’ heads stuck on the puppets! So fun! I had a student make two or three of them and used them as her reading buddies. Students used them to draw fantasy scenes and had many chances to make art to show what they knew in most subject and units. One of the most impactful lessons I learned from having paper puppets as an evergreen teacher resource, were the differences in ability to create three dimensional images. Some age groups were making great pictures, but they were floating in the air, and didn’t have a background.

In the Spring of 2024, I went back to supply teaching and took my Tracimals with me, eager to find any chance to see what students would make of them. With very loose success criteria, I watched different classes, mostly core French, take my new background pieces, my new animal puppets, and my different themed units and joyously 40 minutes absolutely engaged!

In the younger grades, it was really interesting to see the pre-schematic stage, with floating objects and troubles connecting lines after tracing. So, with much encouragement, the TicTacToe Teacher will be creating, using, and sharing a bunch of robust lesson plans and supports for you and your students, in French AND English. You are welcome to try out a storyboard lesson plan and free lesson plan for your own Creative Picasso activity center. I hope you decide to follow along on my journey. There is A LOT more to come!

I now use storyboarding throughout my subjects as a student-led activity center with great success. I want to show you how you can effectively and easily use Tracimals to inexpensively engage students throughout the year with ease!

How to teach to the stages of drawing

Being able to storyboard with paper images takes a bit of practice. Paper cut out art pieces can be easily stuck on paper into action poses with little pieces of glue-pad. Taking time to carefully put bunny puppets or dog puppets into an action pose is a great way to use the elements of art. You can observe two and three-point perspective drawing knowledge, visualization, depth, and editing skills while storyboarding. You could also gather evidence of fine-motor skills or reading comprehension by storyboarding with a list of great prompting questions. Some students will take the knowledge they have learned in any subject, remembered, and understand, and have the natural tendency to apply their knowledge through visually creative ways. They can apply their skills to draw, color, paint, or use oil pastels and getting all messy. What a fun and useful way for students to develop creatively!

Here are the take-aways for using storyboarding in your classroom:

It is best to introduce storyboarding as a regular activity center in your project based classroom:
Storyboarding provides evidence of how the student is developing along with the stages of drawing.
If you are using cute farm animal puppets as a science activity for kindergarten or cutting and assembling paper dog puppets for a junior grade visual arts lesson, storyboarding is a valuable routine to bring into your practice.

Storyboarding provides evidence of how the student is developing along the stages of drawing.
Whether you are using cute farm animal puppets as a science activity for kindergarten or cutting and assembling paper dog puppets for a junior grade visual arts lesson, storyboarding is a valuable routine to bring into your practice.
Storyboarding with different sizes and variations of paper human and animal puppets, and observing how students place them on paper to build a scene will show you if they are in the Pre-schematic stage, Schematic stage, or have made it to the Dawning Realism stage.

Pre-schematic stage (ages 4 – 7):

Students working in the pre-schematic stage will place the paper-puppets and some of the background pieces on the page with little or no regard for a three-point perspective drawing. The shapes may appear to float in space, often with the child in the center of the page.

Tips for working within the pre-schematic stage:

Use student led conferencing practices as an engagement strategy. Together, come up with a loose learning intention and success criteria. Let their creative mind flourish and don’t censor or critique their storyboard!
When setting up a storyboarding activity center, offer a question to entice a real-life experience.
Ask the students to use their imaginations and create a scene. Then, they can tell you the story they have created with the paper cutting art resources you offer.
Tracimal paper-puppets have moving parts. Have students place the people and animal puppets in action poses. Use word walls and vocabulary lists in a second language classroom. Or, you can ask them create a storyboard that shows their comprehension of an event from a storybook.
Use real-life examples and ask them to make a storyboard. Their human puppet could be brushing their teeth, planting flowers, walking their dog puppet. Add details with pencil as a mixed-media art lesson.
As a modification or accommodation, help the students place the objects by training them with fewer pieces and accommodated instructions

Schematic stage (ages 7 – 9):

Between the ages seven to nine, students are still working on a two-dimensional plane but begin to demonstrate three-dimensional spaces on paper. If asked to storyboard with different sizes of paper cut-outs of background images, animals and people, they may or may not get the relative sizing correct. Even before tracing the pieces to create the drawing, storyboarding should be left open to student imagination. Students will elaborate and edit their storyboards and can begin to better trace the pieces once they lay out their scene. By having the pieces laid out, the student can make adjustments as necessary to demonstrate how far along they are in their creative development.

Storyboarding tips for the Schematic Stage:

When introducing Tracimals, or other paper cutting teacher resources for storyboarding, let students build your classroom resource library. Offer some time for them to choose, cut and assemble their own sets to explore.
Student creativity should not be morally judged during the schematic stage of creative development.
Start offering different sizes of animal puppets and background pieces to build three-dimensional scenes. Gradually bring in more and more pieces as a reusable activity center throughout the year.
Show parents their child’s progress with self-directed learner examples.
Take pictures to show a more elaborate story. Ask them to move the characters and pieces in the drawing and take pictures as the story progresses.
Co-create learning goals and success criteria as a collaborative, project-based learning opportunity.
Evaluate second language acquisition curriculum expectations. Give students a human paper puppet or an animal paper puppet and some background pieces and ask them to make an easy image from a prompt. For example: “La fille à gauche du grenier brun, qui porte un robe rouge, est malade.”
To accommodate or modify, pre-layout a scene with depth and hand the student a puppet to place in the scene. Ask the student how big the animal is comparison to the size of another object in the scene. Example: “Is that a really big goat, or is it smaller than the pig?”

Dawning Realism Stage (ages 9 – 11)

According to Lowenfield, during this stage of drawing students develop a more realistic representation of the world around them in their drawings. Giving them a library of reusable classroom printable resources will help them express independence and personal autonomy to create pictures of their personal experiences, emotions, fantasies, using their imaginations. Students in the Dawning Realism stage start to understand how to use show depth and three-dimensional nuances such as light and shade and other elements that create a detailed 3D effect. Instead, they turn their focus towards drawing things with more realistic details more superficially and will focus on filling in the details of their outlines with lines and color.

Storyboarding tips for the Dawning Realism stage:

Make the learning goal and success criteria more specific and intentional with the students to build a project based learning opportunity.
Use a mix of tracing pieces and drawing that interact with the paper animal puppets and human puppets in specific actions as a mixed-media, easily accommodated and modified collaborative lesson or activity center.
Offer opportunities to storyboard fantasies, dreams, and person experiences for subject matter
Allow your artists to use Tracimals and storyboarding as a cross-curricular activity to show their knowledge.
In French class, ask students to first storyboard a scene, then ask questions that they have to answer in French using familiar vocabulary.
As an accommodation or modification in a core-french class, offer the student two animal paper-puppets but ask them to take a specific one, then elaborate with requests as a listening activity. Example: “Prends la vache et met la vache derrière le tracteur.”

Conclusion

In summary, you should be using storyboarding to explicitly observe how far along students are in the creative development process. You will see if they are leaving the Scribbling stage and ready for the Pre-schematic stage during a kindergarten art activity. Perhaps you use student led learning and will put out your paper resources to observe if they are ready for the schematic stage? If you are teaching junior grades, you will be able to watch students storyboard with greater accuracy and attention to more elaborate elements of art and design.

Without even picking up a pencil, your students will have a blast telling stories using themed units of moveable paper puppets and background pieces!

References:

For a deeper understanding, you can refer to Gardner’s detailed explanation in “Frames of Mind” (1983) and “Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons” (2006).

Lowenfeld, V. (2012). The Stages of Artistic Development. wordpress.com. 2024, https://makingartwork.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/stages_of_art_development.pdf

Author bio:

Hi! My name in Mark Welsh.

I have been developing my practice to overcome the professional challenges that we face as teachers day in and day out. There is a lot of pressure on teachers today. In order to survive an entire school year with our energy still up, I have adjusted my professional practice to include methods and lesson plans that I teach using my strengths. I have been working hard to bring my TicTacToe activity centers to Kindergarten and Primary school teachers that are proven to be effective. I say you can reach them all! You can have your best year ever, maintain work-life balance, inexpensively build your teacher resources, and keep administrators and parents happy. More importantly, I want to show you how you can enrich your students’ educational journey and prepare them for a modern world.