A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n
What You Can Do
Building Literacy Through the Arts in Early ChildhoodThe Arts Education Partnership, representing more than 100 national organizations, researched the role of the arts in early childhood. The study identifies the best kinds of experiences for babies, toddlers, preschoolers, and young elementary school students to build cognitive, motor, language, and social-emotional development. Under the philosophy that play is the business of young children, the partnership study found that the arts engage children in learning, stimulate memory, and facilitate understanding. Role-playing games, poems, songs, rhyming, dramatic storytelling, and other creative arts play can develop language skills and a love of learning. The study’s report, Young Children in the Arts, includes developmental benchmarks and appropriate arts activities for children from birth to age 8. Parents and adult caregivers are encouraged to use character voices and dramatic gestures when reading or telling stories and to make sock puppets to increase the enjoyment of the tale. Show-and-tell stories can be created with photographs, and young children can pantomime their favorite book characters before a mirror. Older children can write poems and improvise stories with simple costumes. Resources, research, and programs are available through the database of the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts at www.wolftrap.org.
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