No matter your own skills in the arts, this issue of Teaching Young Children has ideas for you. You’ll learn about “process art”, ways to integrate art into other content areas, using music in your setting, and more!
Arts woven into early education provide additional avenues of learning and growing in homes, schools, and early learning programs throughout communities.
NAEYC promotes high-quality early learning for all children, birth through age 8, by connecting practice, policy, and research. We advance a diverse early childhood profession and support all who care for, educate, and work on behalf of young children.
People often think about art as creating something beautiful—a replica Starry Night collage or a seasonal craft to serve as a gift. But when children engage in process art, they explore and experience materials without working toward a particular goal.
The following DAP snapshot and reflection touches on how one teacher responded to children’s marks on paper, encouraging creativity and integrated learning, particularly around drawing, writing, and storytelling.
In make-believe play, young children are actively engaged with peers and are in control: it is the children—not an adult—who make decisions during play.
Authored by
Authored by:
Barbara Wilder-Smith, Deborah J. Leong, Elena Bodrova
Art is important to the development of young children’s physical and cognitive skills and their aesthetic awareness. Examples of children’s creative expressions often fill early childhood settings. But what about appreciating visual art?
In this article, we describe how early childhood educators can purposefully plan for and scaffold vocabulary learning during open-ended art activities.
In this article, Mimi Brodsky Chenfield shares reflections from her experiences and conversations with children across the early childhood years—each of which builds to a major shift, moving from STEM to STEAM.
This issue of Teaching Young Children provides information about what is developmentally appropriate assessment, and it offers recommendations for how to assess in practical ways.
