Why use art in schooling?

Art is such an amazing path to take in education and new learning — it also plays a crucial role in the holistic development of a child. Art fosters creativity and nurtures imaginative thinking and the child can express themselves so fully in those early prewriting years through art projects.

Thoughts and feelings that are so hard to put into words can be expressed through art instead and I truly believe art is great for developing a great foundation for pre-literacy and later reading and writing skills. In free art you can give you self-expression a platform and it can also be a powerfull therapeutic tool for many.

Poetry and music can give a sense of the language that non-fiction just can and by diving into those art disciplines you expand how you think about language arts.

We can study art from different cultures and throughout history and learn so much about others and by analyzing it also develop our own critical thinking. Getting a deeper cultural and historical understanding of the world around us help us develop new questions about the people around us and before us. We can look at what methods and technics the people used and even implement science in our understanding how a piece of art was made.

Art is also a great tool in developing fine and gross motorskills — my kid got tired of copying letters on lines— but loved her drawing classes and thereby developed her hand muscles and fine motorskills so much more than just by writing. The sensory input from working with different materials — like dipping your hands in wet clay, warm play dough, smelling bee-wax while rolling it between your fingers, or enjoying finger paints are also amazing in developing gross motorskills and a sense of the whole body and your senses.

Art gives us a multidimensional way of learning, a way to feel and experience knowledge in a way textbooks and worksheets never can — that is why I find art to be a fundamental part of our homeschooling.