Arts

Children should be allowed to express themselves through art, language, interaction and physical activity. It helps them become aware of their strengths. They also gain confidence so that when they enter school, they’re ready and eager to learn through art, drama, music and puppetry.

There are various components to art education:

• Music: Young children’s minds are fueled by music.  Research shows it enhances listening, helps develop vocabulary, teaches how to distinguish between sounds and pitches, fosters creative memory and stimulates optimal brain development in the first three years of life. Children learn to differentiate between letters and words, and how to cooperate, think and solve problems. Music’s repetitive nature also boosts memorization.
• Creative movement and dance: Besides being fun, creative movement and dance helps build physical skills, teaches how to channel energy, and provides an outlet for imagination and creativity. Research proves children between the ages of two and seven are at the peak of motor development. Creative movement and dance fine-tunes locomotor—walking, jumping, running and leaping—and non-locomotor—stretching, turning, swinging and shaking—skills. Kids learn to interact in shared space, and become comfortable in their own bodies. Special needs kids especially benefit through a sense of belonging.
• Drama and dramatic play: This fuels children’s imaginations, and makes the world around them easier to understand. Improvisation, body movement and theater games teaches them to take risks, work without fear of being judged, and expands creative potential. Research points to more exuberant and better-behaved children when they participate in pretend play. These kids also have broader vocabularies, and learn to concentrate, pay attention and control their words and behavior. They begin to think abstractly, which experts say is crucial to pre-reading and realizing words represent ideas.
• Visual arts: Art projects demonstrate to children that their creativity is limited only by their own imagination. Art builds self-esteem, cultivates fine-motor skills and boosts pre-reading and pre-math skills. Molding clay into shapes, cutting with scissors and coloring with crayons all require fine motor skills and small muscle control. Children will use these same muscles later to cut food, button shirts and tie shoes. By sorting and classifying—for example, grouping objects by color—they develop reading and math skills.
• Literary arts: This is how kids learn to communicate with the world around them. Early language and literacy development starts in the first three years, and is directly linked to early experiences with books and stories. Those experiences are the building blocks for language, reading and writing.