Cassification of the development of children’s drawing

There are various age classifications for the development of children’s drawings, for example, this:
1) Arbitrary scribbling
The child will try out pencils (felt-tip pens, crayons) and their interaction with paper and other surfaces. The baby has not yet developed coordination of movements between the brain, eye and hand, so he draws on any available surface – a tablecloth, a wall, his own tummy and legs. The kid does not attach importance to the size of the page, the line is broken, it seems that he does not seek to depict anything, just drawing is another function of his hands. At this stage, no hand is dominant, the choice of color is also arbitrary.
2) Organized scribbling
Now you can notice the influence of thinking on the lines reproduced by the child. The kid can decide what he wants to portray, his dashes and dots are no longer random. Instinctively, the baby picks up a comfortable position for the pencil in his hand so that he can control it. More developed motor skills are manifested in the fact that he follows the boundaries of the sheet. This is also a sign that the baby can begin to be taught to order. While working, the child can stop and look at the drawing, trying to paint its details in different colors. This lays the foundation for analytical thinking in the future. The child learns to distinguish parts of the whole, this encourages him to disassemble different objects into parts.
3) Structuring stage
Now he can combine the figures into a whole composition, maintain proportions, make them symmetrical. From analysis he proceeds to synthesis. The leaf becomes the scene of action, this is a sign of the social maturity of the baby. At this stage, he is ready to master complex words and wordy sentences.
4) Stage graphic characters
Now the main thing is the work of the imagination. This period is different for every child. Some children have developed motor skills long before reaching the required level of intellectual development, while others have mental abilities that far exceed muscular ones, and sometimes they develop almost simultaneously. But sooner or later the kid will realize that his painting means something, that is, he will comprehend the meaning of symbolism. It happens like this: the child is not going to portray something specific, but in the process of creativity something – a color, a shape – will remind him of a familiar object or phenomenon. The child is trying to convey the very essence of the depicted object, so it is not always clear to us what lies behind the unusual figure. This, perhaps, is the secret of the children’s genius of drawings. (Source, here are a few more classifications).
So, the period from the beginning of drawing and up to the stage of graphic symbols is called the “pre-pictorial period”, when children cannot yet depict objects. In the language of contemporary art, their work is pure abstractionism, and even, if it is quite accurate, abstract expressionism.
It is during this wonderful period that the foundation of analytical and synthetic thinking, the foundation of the creative development of the child, is laid.