Adapted from Lively Learning: Using the Arts to Teach the K-8 Curriculum, by Linda Crawford

Although we are rarely asked to explain why children should learn to read or do math, we are often called upon to defend time spent teaching them to draw or make music or dramatize. The simple and compelling reason why they need to learn and apply these art forms is that the arts provide a doorway into all learning. Here are six detailed reasons.

Reason 1: The Arts Make Content More Accessible
Over the years when I’ve asked teachers how they learn most effectively, a few have said they learn by listening to new information, but far more have said they learn best if they see something visually or get a chance to try it out. Apparently, most of us learn best by looking, talking, making, moving, or by teaching someone else, and so do the children in our classrooms.

Some students’ first love and first talent is talking rather than writing. Teachers can help these students practice writing skills by channeling the talking into oral storytelling, which then leads to writing down the stories and editing the written versions.

For students who are visual learners, drawing might provide a doorway to writing. The sequence of idea-to-picture-to-word is a natural one. Visual learners might also use drawing to work out story problems in math: “If Corey buys six packages of potato chips, gives one to each of three friends, and eats one at lunch, how many will he have left?” The student can draw the six packages of chips, use arrows to show the transfer of three of them, cross out the fourth, and then count how many are left.

Some children learn best when they engage their whole bodies. These kinesthetic learners might want to act out a story before writing it down, or use their bodies to form geometric shapes or demonstrate the movement of planets. They will gather confidence when they are sure in their bodies as well as their minds about what they are learning.

The goal is that each child will find a favorite option for learning at least once during the day, and over time, all students will have the opportunity to lead with their strengths. By integrating the arts, we allow children to play on all their strings.

Reason 2: The Arts Encourage Joyful, Active Learning
Why should school be any less engaging than the rest of life? Why not appeal to children’s innate yearning for fun? The fact that students are having fun and being playful at school is not a sign that work has stopped. On the contrary, the real work of a fully engaged brain—gathering new data and connecting it with old—is alive and active. “Play is children’s work,” Piaget tells us.

Theater games provide a way to study history, current events, literature, and even the systems of the body or the process of photosynthesis. Hopscotch is both fun and educational if the squares are marked with spelling or vocabulary. Children almost always enjoy making images, and those images can demonstrate their understanding of a character in a novel, or the geographic landscape of a region. The dress-up corner can spark narrative writing. An explanation of the steps of a line dance can develop into expository writing. If work is defined as exertion directed to producing or accomplishing something, then many types of productive play are important educational work.

Reason 3: The Arts Help Students Make and Express Personal Connections to Content

It is a truism (with a lot of research behind it) that children are reluctant to learn something in which they have little interest. Researcher Geoffrey Caine says, “We need to help learners create a felt meaning, a sense or relationship with a subject, in addition to an intellectual understanding.” Relevance, a connection to life outside of school or to things already experienced, helps children care about and make meaning from new lessons.

For most children, the arts provide a natural route for connecting with the curriculum in a personally meaningful way through self-expression. All the diverse members of the community get the chance to express their thoughts and feelings, and in the process to share something vital about who they are. In the midst of the homogeneity of a school curriculum, the opportunity to sing your own song is a gift.

Reason 4: The Arts Help Children Understand and Express Abstract Concepts

Science writer Patricia Wolfe says, “Many of our strongest neural networks are formed by actual experience. Without the concrete experience [of a subject], the representation or symbol may have little meaning, no matter how much someone explains it.” Storytelling, chanting, and movement can provide physical and imaginative access to the abstractions of addition and multiplication. Simulated interviews, role plays, and reenactments can help bring a period of history to life. For example, in a unit on westward movement in the nineteenth century, two students might simulate a conversation between two children traveling in a covered wagon. Likewise, movement and drawing can help clarify scientific processes and poetry’s concrete images can help express big ideas. Effective learning moves from the known to the unknown, from the familiar and personal to abstract understandings. The arts help students make these leaps with confidence.

Reason 5: The Arts Stimulate Higher-Level Thinking

There are basically three kinds of thinking that we want to encourage in our children: attending, discerning, and inventing. Attending and discerning are the more analytical skills. They involve paying attention, reporting accurately, sifting through information, and noticing the relationships among the facts explored. Inventing takes students a step further, to building upon what they have previously learned and thought so they can make new meaning (for example, solving a problem or creating a new approach or vision). Inventing requires imaginative understanding.

The arts provide the tools to help students develop the intellectual muscle for paying careful attention, recording accurately, and analyzing from multiple points of view. And they offer one of the few reliable routes to understanding the world not only as it is, but as we might imagine it to be. The arts help our students develop minds spry and courageous enough to function at a high level in a world constantly in flux.

Reason 6: The Arts Build Community and Collaborative Work Skills

Educators have always known, and research is now confirming, that children’s deepest, longest-lasting learning comes when they are working with others. Teachers at every level understand the value of having students work in small groups to solve problems and demonstrate their understanding. Barbara Rogoff reminds us that peers serve as “highly available and active companions, providing each other with motivation, imagination, and opportunities for creative elaboration of the activities of their community.”

Doing creative things together creates and sustains community. It also promotes the type of learning that is retained long after a project is complete and that motivates future exploration. Children working together on a piece of visual art or music or creative writing engage in intense social interaction, absorb and expand their learning, and perhaps lift the project to a level of imaginative expression and understanding that one student alone could not manage.

Children learn collaboration by practicing it in arts-integrated projects that they love. And through continued practice of collaboration, they deepen their sense of connection to each other.

Arts-infused Lessons Using Choice

Arts-infused Language Arts Lesson: My Word for the Day
Earlier in the day, students had an opportunity to select a word for the day. It could be a word that occurred to them as important or simply one on their minds at that moment. Also, in earlier lessons, the students have experimented with and used pencils and colored pencils in an artwork.

TOPIC: What would your word say in a poem? How would your word show itself in a drawing?
GOAL: To develop an appreciation of the richness of language
PERSONAL CONNECTIONS/SPARK: Drawn on word selected
EXPERT INPUT: Review pencil and colored pencil use; model how to develop a visual pattern based on a word and letters
CHOICES:
What—Poem and/or visual pattern
How—Use a repeating phrase/word as a poetic device; use pencil or colored pencil to create visual pattern
PLANNING: Initial your choice of representation on chart
WORK: Alone for 20 minutes
REFLECTION/SHARING: In partners, share what the word said or what it looked like.

Arts-infused Science Lesson: The Power of Nature
Earlier, students learned techniques of watercolor, pencil drawing, poetic forms, and how to create sound ensembles using simple noisemakers and their own voices and bodies.

TOPIC: When has nature shown me her power?
GOAL: To raise awareness and interest in the natural world
PERSONAL CONNECTIONS/SPARK: Share with partner experiences with the power and mystery of nature
EXPERT INPUT: Mini-lesson on drawing to convey energy; use recalled sensory experiences to guide drawing
CHOICES:
What— Demonstrate a phenomenon in nature (thunder storms, tornadoes, volcanoes, tidal waves, earthquakes, snowflakes, metamorphosis, birth)
How—Create a drawing, watercolor painting, poem, or sound ensemble
PLAN: Initial on chart
WORK: Alone for 15 minutes
REFLECT/SHARE: In partners, share with one another, “The quality of nature I experienced in your piece was …”

Arts-infused Social Studies Lesson Using Choice: Exploring Landforms
Earlier, students explored the elements of dance—making shapes and pathways.

TOPIC: Landforms
GOAL: To express understanding of a landform using the elements of dance
PERSONAL CONNECTION/SPARK: Questions to build connections—
Imagine your favorite outdoor place to visit (or that you wish you could visit).
What landforms do you see in this important place? Turn and talk to a partner near you.
EXPERT INPUT:

1. Brainstorm a list of landforms.
   
2. Share the definition: –noun: Geology.
   a specific geomorphic feature on the surface of the earth, ranging from large-scale features such as plains, plateaus, and mountains to minor features such as hills, valleys, and alluvial fans.
   
   
3. Select a landform for the group to work on as an example. Generate the qualities of the landform and compare to poetry, the sensory language.