It feels great now two weeks after school started! Hah…we did survive it! I am so glad to see my students from last year and especially the enthusiasm they show to be back. I welcome my new students I hope you find in our program the spark that keep you motivated and give you the sense of individuality and power to create and contribute with great things in every day life.
Why Learn Art?
Art experiences develop the ability to:
- Express ideas and feelings open and thoughtfully.
- Form relationships among different items of experience and layer them in thinking through an idea or problem.
- Conceive or imagine different vantage points of an idea or problem and to work toward a resolution
- Construct an organize thoughts and ideas into meaningful units or wholes.
- Focus perception on an item or items of experience, and sustain this focus over a period of time.
Art leaning develops: “Habits of mind” such as elaborative and creative thinking, fluency, originality, focused perception, an imagination, and “dispositions” such as risk taking, task persistence, ownership of learning and student self-perception. “A school” Says Elliot Eisner.
There is so much in art to our souls, minds and life that no author can convey in a book, the more I read the more passionate I become in this journey of teaching art to children. There are so many benefits from academics to individual performance. It seems interesting how oblivious our western society is about art and the benefits it offers to our children: Strengthens problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, adding to overall academic achievement and school success, Develops a sense of craftsmanship, quality task performance, and goal-setting—skills needed to succeed in the classroom and beyond.
We tend to repeat what brings us gratifying results, when children are recognized from a young age as creative, genuine and creators of work that uplift the ones around them, they learn to thrive for more opportunities to feel gratify by those experiences. Perhaps they try to excel and they take every opportunity presented. Unlike in art, boys don’t have to be the best soccer or football player and girls the best and prettiest dancers to feel recognized, they don’t compete to feel recognized! They discover themselves and their inner potential - everything they create is a way of self-expression and they succeed in every try because their work is unique. Kids who do art develop resilience, creativity, communication skills and confidence to create new things. They learn a lifelong skill.
