An Inclusive Early Childhood
Development Program
Introduction
Start with the Arts™ is an instructional resource that uniquely combines literacy, family involvement, and strategies for teaching the arts—visual arts, drama, dance and movement, and music.
An Inclusive Audience
Start with the Arts™ is meant for young children, but many lessons are appropriate or can be easily adapted for older children. The focus is early childhood with the underlying premise that all children, regardless of ability, should be treated with respect and dignity.
Attending school for the first time can be a challenge, especially for children with disabilities. Children with disabilities may develop at different rates and in different ways. They may exhibit challenges with communication, impulse control, motor coordination, and manipulation of materials. To help ensure their success, Start with the Arts™ provides educators with ideas for modifying the environment, adapting materials, and developing appropriate teaching strategies.
This resource is designed to give children of all abilities opportunities to participate successfully in the arts. The lessons focus on children’s abilities, or what children can do—rather than on what children cannot do.
A Variety of Settings
Start with the Arts™ may be used in many different settings, including the classroom, before- and after-school programs, library and museum programs, preschool programs, and children’s developmental and recreational programs. The educator can select the lessons and activities that are most appropriate and integrate them into the current program. The resource is designed to be flexible so that even within lessons, educators can select portions of the lesson that best meet their students’ needs.
Critical Success Factors
The developers of Start with the Arts™ considered several factors important to reaching children effectively and enriching their learning experiences:
The arts are inherently motivating and critical to the development of cognitive, linguistic, motor, social, and emotional skills.
Start with the Arts™ uses arts and literary activities to engage children in expressing concepts, thoughts, and feelings. It helps children to develop an understanding of their personal relationships to the world around them. It builds and strengthens specific skills in literacy and the arts by developing their creativity.
The arts are a natural means for enriching children’s lives with contributions from many cultures and ethnic origins.
Our global, multicultural, and multiethnic society offers many ways of increasing children’s understanding of different viewpoints, different ways of living, and teaching tolerance. As an expression of culture and ethnicity, the arts offer easy access to expanding children’s view of the world. Throughout the lessons, Start with the Arts™ lists books representing children from a variety of family constellations, cultures, and abilities. Some lessons, such as “Music from Many Places,” highlight practices from different cultures. Others include discussion about people from different backgrounds within the lesson.
The arts, fused with a theme approach, work well with
most early childhood programs.
Theme topics generally pertain to children’s life experiences and interests. By selecting topics of high interest to children, educators have opportunities to build on what children currently know and channel children’s interests into the development of new skills and knowledge. Start with the Arts™ is organized into four themes: All About Me; How I Go from Here to There; Feeling Hot, Cold, and Wet; and The World Around Me. The activities within these themes can be easily linked to other activities throughout the early childhood curriculum.
Start with the Arts™ has three to five lessons for each art domain within each theme, with a total of 54 lessons in the entire resource.
The arts and literacy are natural partners.
Literacy, according to Dr. Ernest Boyer in Ready to Learn, is learning to communicate—not just verbally, but nonverbally as well. Young children respond powerfully to visual arts, dance, and music before they are fluent in spoken language.
Becoming literate at a young age involves creating meaning in one’s world and being able to communicate this understanding to others. The arts are an excellent vehicle for engaging young children in this process. By engaging in arts activities, children have opportunities to create and communicate new knowledge in a meaningful context. Using experiences in the arts as a common base, educators can build a language-rich environment by stimulating discussion, responding to children’s natural curiosity, encouraging and modeling language use, and fostering the development of inquiry skills.
(Boyer, Ernest L., Dr. Ready to Learn: A Mandate for the Nation. Carnegie Foundation, 1991.)
Arts activities and arts learning should be continued and extended to the home environment.
Building solid working relationships between educators and families takes time and effort, yet everyone reaps the benefits. The positive rapport that is created not only helps families and their children; it provides educators with insights essential to meeting children’s academic and developmental needs.
Start with the Arts™ strives to encourage families—parents, guardians, older brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends—to take an active role in conversations about the arts activities and to continue the learning in the home setting. To facilitate this, a Family Letter with ideas and a list of books accompanies each lesson.
Along with the Family Letter is a Learning Log, where children reflect and write or draw about their experiences. The log can be shared with the parents or stored in a cumulative portfolio.
Additional Family Letters introduce this Start with the Arts™ resource and its lessons. The letters describe each of the four arts domains, along with ways to assemble special Arts Boxes that make it easy and fun for your child to be creative at home. Refer to Family Letters and Arts Boxes at the end of this introduction.
Children creating during the 2007 Start with the Arts Family Festival in Washington, DC.
