This study aims to explore what effects to picture and character integration activities for the children''s writing skills.
Picture and character integration activities refer to have children''s express and their thoughts at the same time drawing and writing.
This study includes two research questions as follows:
1. How are picture and character integration activities effects to improve children’s meaning-expressional writing skills?
2. How are picture and character integration activities effects to improve children’s conventional writing skills?
The subjects for this study were 36 children 18 for an experimental group and 18 for a comparative group who attended a private kindergarten located in Gimcheon-si, Gyeongsanbuk-do. Before conducting experiments, all the subjects were pretested to check their writing skills. The results did not present meaningful differences between the two groups, which meant those groups were identical in existing writing skills.
After the pretest, the study had been conducted for 12 weeks, from April 2, 2012 to June 22, 2012. During this period, the young children in the experimental group were instructed to represent what they experienced for a day by connecting to what they learned from a topic of the day in class. Sometimes, after a field trip, they were guided to represent what they felt and thought from the outdoor activity, and they freely in drawing and writing. In case of the young children in the comparative group, they received the general education by the existing curriculum of the kindergarten. Those children could participate in the writing activities when they voluntarily wanted.
In the process of verifying the results, this study used the Writing Skills Assessment Scale translated by Noh Yeong-hee (1944) from the Kindergarten Writing Assessment by Lindberg (1987). To analyze the data, this study used the SPSS 19 program, and the Independent Sample t-Test to examine the homogeneity among the subjects. The test results of average values in pre- and post-test for each group were presented on the graphs of broken lines, which were helpful to easily visualize the results.
As a result, this study drew two conclusions from the test on the effects of picture and character integration activities on the children’s writing skills.
First, the experiment group showed meaningful differences from the comparative group in all of the five sub-scales to examine children’s meaning-expressional writing skills.
The experimental group showed a significant improvement in the sub-scales such as coordination of drawing, speaking, and writing, articulation in drawing, sophistication and integration in drawing, complexity and integration in writing, fluency in writing, and details in writing. This result implied the picture and character integration activities were effective in improving children’s meaning-expressional writing skills.

Second, the experiment group showed meaningful differences from the comparative group in all of the five sub-scales to examine children’s conventional writing skills.
The experimental group showed a significant improvement in recognizing the shapes of characters, understanding the relations between sounds and symbols, and performance in spelling, punctuations, and word spacing. This result represented the children’s were effective in improving children’s conventional writing skills.