Introduction
The Arts and the Early Learning Guidelines
What does art look like in early childhood?
- A toddler making shapes with their shadow against a wall.
- A two-year-old stirring a bucket full of mud and colorful leaves.
- A three-year-old rolling out clay snakes.
- A four-year-old building a house out of blocks and then imagining that small figures represent family members and what they say and do during meal time.
- A five-year-old pretending to be a superhero in the dramatic play center and at recess.
- A six-year-old working with friends to paint the backdrop for a performance of a story they dictated.
- A group of seven-year-olds singing in a choir.
- An eight-year-old performing a dance they have rehearsed while their friend plays the drums.
From an early age, children engage with the world as artists, composing arrangements of objects, lines, colors, words, sounds, movements, and gestures. Children use art all the time, to represent their ideas about beauty, science, math, history, and relationships. Art-making is an important component of social-emotional development, giving children ways to express and understand their feelings. Children’s engagement in art is intense and concentrated, and their creations are often startlingly poetic.
Within a play-based learning environment, children access all the arts, continuously, to represent their thinking in increasingly precise, varied, and complex ways. Each child develops unique forms of expression that reflect their own disposition, interests, and abilities. For these reasons, dance, music, theater,and visual and media arts do not each have their own domain within the Early Learning Guidelines but are incorporated throughout all of the sub-domains.
The Early Learning Guidelines include descriptions of the processes by which children engage in art. These include:
- Creativity and Inventiveness (Approaches to Learning)
- Representing (Cognitive Development)
- Composing (Language and Literacy)
- Creating and Interpreting Multimedia Texts (Language and Literacy)
The educator’s role is to provide children with a variety of interesting materials and time to explore them. Children’s artwork should be open-ended and entirely their own. Experiences in which children follow an educator’s model and there is a “right” way to complete the project are lessons in following instructions rather than examples of children’s artistic expression.
As children mature, the educator’s role also includes introducing them to the formal vocabulary of dance, music, theater, and visual and media arts. Children should have the opportunity to learn both the vocabularies of artistic expression from their own cultures and from other cultures. It is important that that all children have an opportunity to explore all the arts, so that they may find forms of expression that resonate with them.