Abstract
There is a tendency in elementary school art education for ‘materials and tools’ to become the primary learning source. Especially, the focus on ‘materials’ has its root in the characteristics of ‘creative expression’, a skill related activity. In other words, the practical theory, that children’s creative expression develops through materials, tools, place, and the human body that drives creation, has been the deciding factor in support of such a view, including the importance of ‘rigorous selection of materials’. However, the manifestation of children’s expressional skill is also heavily dependent on physical cognitive activities such as feeling and perception towards various events as well as thought processes that alternate between examination and decision. Therefore, it is not convincing that the ‘characteristics of materials’ alone supports or leads the whole range of the generation of expressional meaning. In order to support children’s ‘creative expressional skill’, tools that support children’s thought processes according to the situations also should be counted as ‘materials and tools’, perhaps more than ‘rigorous selection of materials’, and consideration of the effective use of these new tools can become a requirement for running a class.
