Similar to children's play, the act of undirected drawing is spontaneous. A child's drawing represents the mental pictures and perceptions he or she has of the world. Often, a child's creativity reflects his or her reality in a specific historical context.

Drawings may also reflect the historical moment of the children's reality. For example, racial segregation was clearly a theme among black and white school children in the United States in the 1960s (Coles, 1968), just as apartheid was the predominant theme of the South African black children's drawings in the 1980s (The Open School, 1987).

Children who live in the war zones of the world depict elements of armed conflict in their drawings, (Garbarino, Kostelny, and Dubrow, 1991; Vornberger, 1986). Following the start of the Gulf war, children in a Chicago elementary school drew pictures of the 1991 air attacks on Iraq. Missiles, grenades, helicopters, fighter planes and dead men with bloody faces were depicted in graphic detail.

Along with their drawings of real events, children draw fantasies. For example, during World War II, the children confined to the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia "drew the things that adult also saw … endless queues, funeral carts, and executions, and the things that adults don't see: princesses, wizards, witches, and insects with human faces" (Volavkova, 1944; Garbarino, 1992).

Similarly, when we look at Palestinian children drawings during the Al-Aqsa Intifada we can see that the children between the age of 10 and 13, who had been living through the trauma of the Israeli occupation, their drawings reflect a lot of fear specially from the shelling either from the Helicopters or from the tankers. Although we can conclude such fears but sometimes we can see that the child look to himself as a hero who has ability to stand in front of the tankers and to challenge the Israeli soldiers and to raise the Palestinian flag.