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Volume 5, Issue 3 Welcome to the ChildCare Education Institute March Newsletter! This month, CCEI Discusses 'Art and the Brain'! Most educators and parents agree that the arts should have a place in the early childhood curriculum. Parents rarely ask "Why?" when they hear that their children will spend time drawing, painting, sculpting, dancing, or playacting activities during the day in child care. After all, art is fun and engaging and children like it! Isn't that reason enough? It should be. However, as early childhood curriculum standards continue to rise, educators and parents need to ensure that arts in the preschool curriculum do not suffer the same fate as arts in the K-12 curriculum. In recent years, researchers and educators have focused intently on the connection between art and brain development. In particular, people want to know if art promotes higher academic achievement. Researchers are partly motivated by a major decline in the role of art in the K-12 curriculum, spawned by an intense focus on standardized testing and skills-based curricula, along with budget cuts (which often put art on the chopping block first). For supporters of arts education, the need to find a connection between art and brain development goes something like this: "If we can show that art improves math and reading scores, maybe they will put art supplies back in the budget." Researchers know that mathematicians rely heavily on the same part of the brain as musicians.  For example, if you could compare brain scans from Einstein and Mozart, you would notice similarly dense concentrations of synaptic connections in the same regions of their brains. However, we still do not know with certainty whether practicing music improves math skills, or vice versa. Despite millions of dollars and countless studies, nobody has offered conclusive evidence that arts education improve standardized test scores and literacy rates.
Perhaps all that money is better spent on art supplies! Many factors contribute to whether a child performs well on a test. Maybe arts education can boost reading and math skills and maybe it can't. That's beside the point. It is far more important to focus on the things we already know about art and the brain!
What art materials or curriculum have you introduced in the classroom to encourage learning through art? Log in to the and share how you have promoted discovery, development and creativity through the use of art in the classroom. Art Across the Curriculum By: Francis Wardle, Ph.D. |
What else do children gain from the arts?
