In recent years, art education has been recognized as a suitable tool for enhancing emotional intelligence and nurturing a child's creative development. However, it seems that the education of art has lost the race against other primary school subjects, with only a minimal number of lessons being taught. The establishment of the afternoon art…

The City of Melbourne's ArtPlay is open to children and young people aged 3-13 years, and provides a wide range of artist-led programs that serve a broad community within and outside the municipality. Its sister facility, Signal, caters for young people 13-22 years. An Australia Council of the Arts funded Creative Community Partnership Initiative,…

This paper utilises a Vygotskian framework to examine the ways in which teachers shape the creation of children's artwork in educational contexts. Reflexive ethnography and a bottom up approach to discourse analysis are used to analyse a range of qualitative data including photographs, observational notes and audio recordings collected from a Year…

Art teachers are renowned for their claims that the creative properties of their senior secondary pupils' artworks occur as a result of the realisation of a creative process. Drawing on my recent ethnographic studies in senior art classrooms in Sydney, Australia, and Illinois, USA, I uncover a sociological, rather than a psychological explanation…

The purpose of this study was to investigate methods of enhancing kindergarteners' artistic creative thinking and expressive drawing through an activity that involved appreciation of picture books. The study was conducted in a public kindergarten in southern Taiwan, with 27 children aged between 4 and 5. The researcher conducted the study in 16…

This book is designed to be of assistance to primary school teachers who have had little training in arts and crafts and for use in teacher training colleges. Tested in Nigeria and Jamaica, this manual gives children an opportunity to develop their natural creativity, and also develops accuracy and manual dexterity in hand skills. Lesson plans are…

Argues that the arts are basic to educational development, as they provide the tools and skills that are central to early language development including story, metaphor, rhyme and rhythm, binary structuring and mediation, image formation from words, affective abstraction, and others that underlie more complex learning. (Author)

Performance in drama, dance, music, puppetry, or combinations of these arts can be an exciting encounter for young children. This case study investigated one 4-year-old's responses to a children's opera. Her responses before, during, and after the performance were systematically observed and analyzed. Data showed that the child had some knowledge…

Argues that the arts provide a powerful means with which to promote future-oriented learning because they involve nonverbal, symbolic ways of knowing, thinking and communicating. Suggests that the arts in the emergent curriculum promote central education skills of discovery, pursuit, self-awareness, personal communication, social interaction,…

Argues that children need play time to explore the world because it is valuable, irreplaceable, spontaneous, and provides situations where children can learn with all their senses. Examines play in terms of its role in exploration, imagination, creative activity, work, learning, knowledge expansion, art, and the culture of children. (Author/SD)