Process art can help K-8 students express their emotions and practice critical developmental skills.
By Katie Loos)
From using scissors to explaining creative choices, kids in elementary through middle school can benefit from process art by advancing developmental skills like verbalization, motor skills, spatial reasoning, social-emotional expression and more, experts say. Kids can also apply critical thinking to draw parallels between visual art and another field like math, science, language arts and social studies.
Sean Murphy, an art teacher at Samuel W. Tucker Elementary in Alexandria, Virginia, often relates the arts curriculum to his students' other classes. When kids learn about quadrilaterals in math, for example, his class focuses on abstract and real life uses of shape. Making these connections, he says, allows students to ask deeper questions and approach their artwork with an interdisciplinary lens.
The artistic process can also open up conversations about artists, art and culture from around the world. Kids benefit from exposure to different cultures and can make discoveries about their own cultural identity through art, Murphy says.
A big advantage of process art, Bakri says, is that kids can "express themselves in a way that comes more naturally" – it allows them to externalize their thinking through visual expression. Crow agrees, noting that "when engaging in process art, in many ways we're extending the scope of our mind. We're really making the invisible visible. We're trying to articulate things that didn't exist in the world before."
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