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How Art Promotes Development
Art
The Art Area is a place filled with materials that children can enjoy on a purely sensory level. Here children can create and represent their ideas in a visual form. On a table or the floor, at an easel or a workbench, children draw, paint, knead, cut, glue, and make things of their own choosing. Sometimes they simply explore the materials and enjoy the process. At other times they create designs or make something that represents a real object, place, or living thing. Creative art is another language children use to express what they know and what they feel. The Art Area is a studio for children’s development and learning.
Social/emotional development. Art is a natural vehicle for children to
express their feelings. Children reflect their thoughts and emotions through their choices of color, texture, and media. For example, when happy or excited, a child might use bright colors. When sad or upset, a child may choose darker tones. Children also express their originality and individuality in their art. Who says the pumpkins they paint have to be orange? A child may prefer having a purple one simply because it will stand out better in a patch.
Physical development. As children tear paper for a collage or use scissors to
cut, they refine small muscle movements. Making lines and shapes with markers and crayons or hitting a nail on the head with a hammer are activities that help children develop the fine motor control they need for writing. Art is all about fine motor skills.
Cognitive development. Children draw, paint, and sculpt what they know. As
they translate their ideas and feelings into art, they use thinking skills to plan, organize, select media, and represent their impressions. When children draw, paint, and make collages, they experiment with color, line, shape, and size. Using paints, fabrics, and woodworking tools they make choices, try out ideas, plan, and experiment. They learn about cause and effect when they mix colors. Through trial and error, they learn how to balance a mobile and weave yarn.
Language development. Children often talk about what they are doing and respond to questions about their creations as they engage in art. Teachers can write down what children say about their artwork as a permanent record of the experience. Art also fosters vocabulary development as children learn and use related technical vocabulary: sculpture, palette, and clamp, to name just a few terms.
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Chapter 9: Art
The Teacher’s Role
Art materials, like blocks, have the potential for stimulating a broad range of creative endeavors. Teachers who understand the value and potential of art materials take an interest in children’s pleasure as they apply paint to paper, glue wood scraps together, and pound a lump of clay. They appreciate that for preschool children, what they make is often less important than the creative process itself. And they know that art is a vehicle for children to express what they know and what they feel. In addition to encouraging children to create with art materials, teachers can help children learn to appreciate art. As children observe their creations, the art of their peers, and the art of recognized painters and sculptors in their community and in museums, they develop an aesthetic sense. Fine art can both inspire and please them. The teacher’s role in The Creative Curriculum is based on this holistic view of art. Our philosophy has been influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach to art. Reggio teachers—like Creative Curriculum teachers—value children as both creators and “meaning makers.” You play a vital role in making art a joyful learning experience.
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The Creative Curriculum for Preschool
Observing and Responding to Individual Children
Your first step in using the Art Area to promote children’s learning is to observe what children do so you can determine how best to respond to each child. We suggest that you begin this task by observing where each child is developmentally. Children go through distinct stages that will give you clues to how they are developing and the skills they have mastered.
Stages in Painting and Drawing
The development of drawing and painting skills are very much like writing. Children need to scribble before they learn to write letters or draw realistically.
Stage I: Scribbling and Making Marks
In this first stage, children manipulate different media and enjoy the effect they have. They use crayons, pencils, or paintbrushes to make marks. Because their fine motor control and eye-hand coordination are still developing, they go through a long period of experimenting. The random marks and scribbles they make are a form of sensory exploration.
Stage II: Making Shapes, Outlines, Designs, and Symbols that Have Personal Meaning
In the second stage children become purposeful in their scribbling. Through continued drawing and painting, they begin to make patterns, to repeat patterns, and to create designs in their scribblings. A circle with lines in it may be Mommy’s face, or actually represent Mommy’s entire essence. While adults may not recognize these patterns as being anything specific, they indicate an attempt to organize the children’s world. At this stage, being able to create is more important than making something recognizable to adults.
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Chapter 9: Art
Stage III: Pictorial Art that Is Becoming Recognizable to Others
Once children gain mastery of crayons, markers, and paintbrushes, they want to create something. Though they don’t always plan their pictures beforehand, what shows up on the paper once they start to draw or paint makes them think of something.
With experience, older preschoolers will begin to plan in advance what they will draw or paint. The self-portrait is a typical favorite subject. Children may experiment with size, proportion, and placement on the paper. Many children will focus their drawing around a large circular head and tiny stick-like arms and legs. Another benchmark of this developmental stage is “X-ray” art—depicting interiors and exteriors all at the same time. You might see a child’s drawing of a firetruck that shows both the outside of the vehicle and the passengers and hose inside.
Stage IV: Realistic Art
By the time they are 4 and 5, most children are interested in doing art that looks real. As much as we want to avoid stereotypes, many boys like making drawings of superheroes, transportation vehicles, and warlike scenes. Girls frequently are interested in drawing people, rainbows, and floral vistas. Both boys and girls seem to like drawing the important people in their lives.
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Stages in Using Other Art Materials
Although the stages children go through in other media aren’t as clear-cut as the stages in drawing and painting, children’s use of these media is nonetheless developmental. They move from a stage of exploration (functional play) to one of experimentation (constructive play). Initially, children familiarize themselves with the medium: What does clay feel like? How do you hammer nails? What makes the collage items stick? How does a loom work? Children like to use all of their senses to learn about a particular medium before they begin to use it purposefully. Gradually, as they become familiar with the new medium, they experiment with it. They roll clay into worms. They pound roofing nails into a tree stump. They paste pictures on cardboard to see how they look when glued to a surface. With experience, children’s experiments become purposeful and more skilled. Eventually, they are able to turn clay into an animal, make a sculpture out of wood, make a balanced design in a collage, and weave scraps of ribbons on a loom. Increasing skills enable children to become ever more creative and purposeful in their art.
Increasing skills enable children to become ever more creative and purposeful in their art.
Responding to Each Child
From your observations of children using the Art Area, you can plan experiences that will further children’s growth. As you carefully observe a child in action, reflect on what you have seen and heard, so that your response will help the child develop and refine skills. Think about whether a child • is able to effectively hold and use a scissors, paintbrush, crayons, chalk, and other art materials • comes up with her own ideas or looks to others for inspiration • represents her ideas and feelings in different art forms • is able to describe what he likes about his own and others’ art • takes risks in creating art that looks different • enjoys using art to illustrate stories and to make books Based on your observations, you can determine each child’s developmental strengths and challenges. Use the Developmental Continuum to guide your reflections and responses. The chart that follows gives examples of how this might work.
Observe carefully to learn how a child uses art materials.
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