Six-year-old children can’t help but express themselves. They say what they think, whether it’s the topic everyone else is on or not. They paint great messes, passing through the point where the picture looks complete to an adult and adding more and more color or water until the texture of the paper or the color pools become the new experience. They love to throw themselves around the room, climbing and piling in a full physical experience. They sing loudly and repetitiously, enjoying the noise. They shriek with laughter at a funny word, sound, or movement. How could you not love them?

What better prerequisite for the arts than such multi-faceted enthusiasm and energy? What an obvious starting point for journeys into academics! My own education in the arts was so weak and my talent so average that it has rarely been a way to look at and understand the world. I see this now as narrow, a narrowness encouraged by a marginalization and segregation of arts education.

Through a wide lens
My own education in the arts was so weak and my talent so average that it has rarely been a way to look at and understand the world. I see this now as narrow, a narrowness encouraged by a marginalization and segregation of arts education. Children leave their homeroom for art and music, and what the children do in that other place can be an unknown to me and a real disconnect from the rest of the day. Yet in their arts experiences, the children are already doing the very thing I personally need to work on—viewing the world through a wide lens. As I learn to do this, their life in my classroom will be the richer for it. The challenge I am first taking on, then, is to incorporate the arts into a math unit I have taught early in the school year, using the many large, colorful insect models I have in my room. Instead of merely counting, sorting, and patterning these insects, I would like to extend the insect theme into science and literacy.

One of the objectives of the thematic unit will be to have students learn that insects have three body parts and six legs. The children will use the insect models to observe and identify the body parts. Their initial task will be to look for and draw shapes. We will draw the first insect together, perhaps a beetle with a nice, big oval, and some circles and lines. I can imagine that the children will want to fill in the shapes with their own wild colors and designs.

Singing with the beetles
I’m not sure what bug songs are out there, but we’ll find them and sing them, as well as chants like "My insect is a beetle, a beetle, a beetle / My insect is a beetle/ And it always goes like this: ___! ____!" The children will add verses as we discover more facts about more insects. I need to not be afraid of my own voice, and use a disc or tape to support me when I need it. These are the things that when I have done them seem so powerful. Children love them, and they fix the concepts in their minds permanently, with little effort.

I have had plenty of evidence over the years of children applying the arts to the curriculum on their own. For example, in the butterfly unit, they paint butterflies or make them from paper. They use blocks to build butterfly museums in which they organize the plastic model butterflies. They dress up as butterflies. Last year, one active little boy stood still for at least ten minutes while dressed in wings and antenna. To his classmates concerned questions he would reply by opening one eye and saying, "I’m resting. I’m still in the chrysalis."

I now hope to be able to offer my children some basic art instruction inside whatever themes we are studying. The difference for me this year will be a greater respect for the arts as a way to understand and explore subject matter, not as an add-on. This appreciation will guide instruction, with the inclusion of the arts in the main flow of each day.

Ruth Currie teaches 1st-graders at Bangor Elementary School in Bangor, WI.

This article first appeared in Origins: A Newsletter for Educators, Fall 2002