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Dear Families,

There are many ways for children to access art both at school and at home. There is so much your child can learn from art. We can work together as partners to provide your child with creative opportunities that will benefit their overall development. We can support different areas of your child’s development through art as it promotes motor skills, language, social-emotional, and cognitive development. For example, fine-motor development is supported through drawing, painting, and sculpting. When you describe and use of new words during art experiences, you are guiding your child’s language development. Art experiences give children the chance to understand the properties of materials. We should give children opportunities to explore and combine different media. The more they understand the material, the more possibilities there are.

Our role is to comment on your child's actions. When it is appropriate, we can suggest they try something different. Children should be encouraged to talk about what they create and reflect on their work. This builds their self-esteem and promotes healthy social-emotional development. Art also fosters cognitive development through activities that solidify cause and effect, reasoning, and analysis. Group work provides opportunities for children to brainstorm and create together. It allows them to share their creations with the larger group or community.

Art at our center

Your child has access to art experiences every day at school. These range from exploratory activities to more structured activities and may include drawing, painting, sculpting, and much more. Oftentimes, art activities get messy. We will do our best to keep your child’s clothes clean, but we ask that you dress your child in clothes that can get messy. We really appreciate this because it allows the children to truly engage in art experiences and reap all of the benefits. The art experiences that your child will engage in will focus on the process of art rather than their final products. If we place too much emphasis on the product, your child’s creativity cannot flourish.

Art at home

Art experiences can happen at home just as they do in the classroom. You can create an area or areas for your child to create, display, and store their art work and materials. You can use encouraging phrases like we do in the classroom to encourage your child’s focus on the process rather than product of their work. For example, you can say, “Tell me more about your drawing” rather than, “I like the fish you drew.” This encourages your child to think about how they feel about their work and it gets them to use their own words to describe their work. It is important to focus not only on your child’s work, but also to expose them to others’ artwork. You can talk about art in books, on display in your home, and at museums.

Please let us know what questions you have about the creative activities we provide in our classroom. Together we can provide your child with art opportunities that will benefit their creativity and overall development!