EARLY LEARNING THROUGH ART

CREATIVE BEGINNINGS©

Creative Beginnings© is an award-winning professional development program for preschool teachers, designed to introduce the arts as a teaching tool into the early childhood classroom which was developed by Young Audiences of New Jersey and is now available through Young Audiences of Houston. Creative Beginnings© promotes early childhood development and school readiness by training early childhood educators to effectively use the arts in their classrooms. The arts allow children to express their creativity, make meaningful choices and grow in their understanding of themselves and the world. Participating pre-school teachers receive rigorous training and one-on-one support to incorporate the arts into their classroom curriculum. Teachers explore and develop their own creativity and expertise, making them more confident and engaged professionals. One crucial aspect of working in the arts is using open-ended questions with students and stimulating their reflection as they make art. This is explicitly modeled and taught in Creative Beginnings©. The program’s success stems from teachers observing teaching artist modeling best practices with their own students. This creates a rich environment for teachers to become inspired, learn and grow. Schools that have participated over time have made long-term commitments to include the arts in their curriculum and the arts are now part of who they are.

FAMILY ARTS AND CREATIVITY©

Early Childhood Family Arts and Creativity© (ECFAC) provides professional development training for artists and teachers who in turn facilitate family arts workshops in their own school community. Each workshop is led by a team composed of an artist, and two teachers--one classroom teacher and ideally one specialist in visual art, music, media, dance, or theater. Teams collaborate in a series of day-long professional development workshops to develop lessons for use with families. Upon completion of the training, artist-teacher teams present these lessons in a series of evening workshops in participating schools. Family Arts and Creativity can also be adapted for after-school and community workshops.

Given the importance of creative and purposeful play for pre-school children, the ECFAC© workshops were developed to engage parents and their young children in open-ended arts activities. Embedded in these activities are experiences essential to building pre-reading skills, such as symbol recognition, sequencing, ordering and identifying similarities and differences. The workshops also introduce parents and children to arts materials and age appropriate arts ideas.