Tag: Curriculum

Our introduction to Integrated Arts in Education proved to be an interesting session as we were challenged to think about the real impact of exploring a range of Arts in the classroom. This insight into the importance of arts to children helped me to realise the weight we put on literacy and numeracy in the classroom is significant, and we need to start putting more emphasis on the arts as a prominent part of primary education. Fleming (2012) discusses the idea that the arts provide us with a deepened perception of our world, help us engage in other activities and widen our knowledge, therefore linking to our session’s main discussion points that the arts have a worthy claim to be a bigger part of education.

During both our visual arts and music session we discussed how they can be nurtured in the classroom, for instance in our music session we played some rhythm games which could be useful to engage young pupils. Also, in visual arts we discussed the importance of letting children explore their imagination and not to discourage them from creating ambiguous works of art. One element of the session that stuck with me was the value of appreciating a small child’s work even although, as teachers, we may not always understand it. Furthermore, we looked at the different stages of children’s development in drawing such as the scribble stage, the pre-schematic stage, schematic stage and the transitional stage. We looked the example of artwork from each of these stages:

 

The practical aspect of physically looking at the artwork created helped me to understand the different stages and appreciate the work gone into them. Whitehead (2010) also discusses the idea of the importance on the scribbling stage in young children for their development in not only the arts, but also in all curricular areas as the need to progress their writing skills.

As a developing primary teacher this session allowed me to develop my knowledge and gain a new understanding of the importance of arts in the classroom. I felt that it was very beneficial to me as I will be more aware of how needed art, music, dance and drama are in all aspects of the curriculum and how they can be integrated into other areas in order to increase children’s evolvement, confidence and enjoyment.

 

References –

Fleming, M.(2012) The Arts in Education. Oxen: Routledge.

Whitehead, M. (2010) Language and Literacy in the early years 0-7. 4th Ed. London: Sage.