At Morningside School, we infuse art into each and every day. We believe that art for young children needs to be about the process, not the product or end result. This means you won’t often see 16 exact replicas of a craft project on our bulletin boards. We value each child’s unique ideas about their creations, and encourage individuality in every art experience. Our art gallery in the preschool room features these explorations of media, line, shape, direction, size, texture, color, and value.
In a recently published e-book Art Not Craft, Christie Burnett lists the reasons to do open-ended art with young children. She says,
- Art experiences provide important sensory stimulation for young children. A wide range of sensory experiences (involving touch, sight, sound, smell and taste) assist babies, toddlers and preschoolers to develop brain connections essential to later learning. The more of these experiences they have, the more brain connections are developed and reinforced.
- Art provides a vehicle for children to freely and safely express their own ideas and emotions.
- With thoughtful encouragement, art experiences can be a tool for children to communicate what they are learning.
- Children’s creative responses can tell us a lot about a child and their individual ideas, thoughts, emotions and understandings of the world.
- Art experiences in childhood and, importantly, our attitudes towards them, will influence how a child views their own artistic ability and their level of creative confidence as an adult. What we do now impacts a child’s self-perception as a creative individual – for life.
- Art experiences involve children in communicating symbolically, an important understanding for learning to read and write.
- Being creative requires children to organise their thoughts, to reason, invent and solve problems.
- Art helps children to learn and practise many important language, mathematical and physical concepts and skills.
- Creating art is fun.
This does not mean that there is never a place for craft projects — in fact, we view crafts as an opportunity to teach children how to follow directions or learn other specific fine motor skills. But craft is not art and we are passionate about that difference. Many preschools get caught in the trap of using “art” projects to communicate to parents what they are doing each day at school. Sometimes teachers even feel pressured to make the projects “look cute” or perfect. At Morningside School, we are pretty sure that you would much rather put your child’s work on the fridge and not a teacher’s, so we are careful to design our art experiences to be within the capability of each child! 🙂