How art in the homeschooling curriculum can make your child smarter.

Art is not only for fun. As we have already verified, crafts can be detrimental to your homeschooling curriculum but art can make your child smarter and I'd like to explain how.

If you are homeschooling your children you have a very vested interest in their growth and their success. You therefor have to make sure that the children get all the necessary skills they need from the homeschooling curriculum.

You might have thought that art was the needed tension relieving, chilled out activity, sort of recreational time needed between learning bouts. But I am here to tell you of the need to incorporate art into your daily homeschooling curriculum. (as part of the curriclum itself)

Notice I said art and not crafts.

To explain the difference. Crafts usually follows a predetermined model, art does not.

There are a few reasons that most people choose crafts over real art.

#1- They feel they are not artistic and cannot really teach their children art
#2- They don't know how to go about giving appropriate art activities
#3- Crafts seems so easy. Instructions simply laid out and all the children need to do is follow the directions.

But that however leads to little robots and that is certainly not what we want.

Art is not only for young preschool age children as many may think but should be continued well into the elementary school years.

As all areas of curriclum for children ideally should be geared towards their developmental levels art is the perfect fit. It fits into every developmental stage. All children can do the same activity yet all of their art will look different. Because they are all at a developmentally different stage.

Take collage as an example: Give a 3yr old child a collage and she will randomly paste pieces of collage materials on top of each other or maybe just paste down one piece of paper onto her paper. Give an older elementary school age child a collage and he will create an elaborate, well thought out beautiful piece of artwork. That's only of course if he is used to being able to do creative artwork on his own, not crafts.

If he is only used to crafts, then he will also not know what to do with a collage. His thinking skills will be frozen.

All art activities when given in a thoughtful manner should cause the children to think....where should I put this.......should I cut this........how many pieces do I need for this.......Etc.

The more chances children are given to think and solve each problem the more their cognitive, thinking skills are developed.

Even at a young age a child has to think about placement of his collage pieces. Or she has to decide how much paint to use and where to put it. The older they get the more complicated decisions they have to make and the art activities have to be presented properly.

Every art activity that the children get, be it a more creative, non directional one like painting, clay or collage or even a more directed creative activity, needs to be thought out. "How much thinking will go into this activity...will my children be using her brains to do this activity?" If yes then go ahead.

For an example on how to do a specific non crafts approach to a Thanksgiving turkey click here

And click here for a FREE downloadable report on Tray painting,
a wonderful art activity that children just adore


Faige Kobre
homeschoolartmaven