Abstract
The annual Nadran sea festival in coastal West Java, Indonesia, is a living cultural space in which maritime heritage, communal participation, and Islamic interpretations of gratitude intersect. This study explored how five-year-old children represented and recontextualized Nadran after a culturally situated storytelling and drawing activity. Twenty-five children from an Islamic kindergarten in a coastal community produced drawings in individual draw-and-tell sessions. The story introduced Nadran as a tradition of gratitude and mentioned customary elements, including decorated boats, offerings, a buffalo head, and prayer. This focused qualitative analysis examines five cases selected because the correspondence between their drawings and child-confirmed accounts was especially clear and because they illustrated recurring patterns in the preliminary dataset. Drawings and teacher-scribed accounts were analyzed together through qualitative content analysis and social-semiotic attention to representation, repetition, salience, spatial composition, and narrative relations. Boats, seawater, flags, crowds, and movement toward the sea formed a shared maritime-processional schema. Two cases made the buffalo head visually salient, whereas others emphasized decorated boats and collective participation. Gratitude and blessing were explicit in two accounts, while the remaining children foregrounded festivity, excitement, and communal experience. The findings indicate layered cultural meaning rather than uniform theological understanding: children combined direct festival experience, family and community knowledge, and elements made available in the preceding story. Drawing-and-telling provided a developmentally responsive means of examining how children selectively reconstructed a local tradition. Because only five information-rich cases were examined in depth, the findings are illustrative rather than representative of the full group.