Arts Academy of Hollywood

Arts Education is not about creating future artists. It’s about enabling dream-making to happen in all students.

THE ARTS:

• inspire self-confidence, self discipline, and help kids in school
• help kids develop critical skills for life and work
• improve students performance in other subject areas
• expose kids to a range of cultures and points of view
• refine cognitive and creative skills
• strengthen problem solving and critical thinking skills
• have a tremendous impact on the developmental growth of every child
• enhance intellectual, personal and social development
• have the ability to reach children who otherwise may be unreachable
• explore relationships between ideas and objects
• serve as links between thoughts and actions
• offer unique sources of enjoyment and refreshment for the imagination
• help us to see and grasp life in new ways
• promotes development of literacy, higher order thinking and problem solving
• plays a central role in cognitive, motor, language and social emotional development

An Arts Education teaches children life skills such as:

• developing an informed perception
• articulating a vision
• developing the ability to imagine what might be
• accepting responsibility to complete tasks from start to finish
• dance helps build motor skills, body relationships and a sense of direction
• drawing, sculpting and other visual arts develop spatial acuity
• group activities such as learning dance steps or singing songs build social skills
• describing people and things in their world using pictures, body movements and mime enhances descriptive, non-verbal and cognitive abilities
• repeating stories, poems and songs strengthens memory
• art supplies children choose for their work reflects their approach to process and outcomes

An Arts Education nurtures important values including:

• team building skills and respecting alternative viewpoints
• appreciating and being aware of different cultures and traditions

An Arts Education teaches children life skills such as:

• stimulates memory
• facilitates understanding
• enhances symbolic communication
• promotes relationships
• provides an avenue for building confidence

An Arts Education provides a natural source of learning:

• play is the way children promote and enhance their development
• the arts are the most natural vehicle for play
• creative play is what young children naturally do, singing, dancing, drawing and pretending
• dramatic play, rhyming games and songs are language rich activities that build reading skills
• compelling evidence exists that early arts experience has an impact on all aspects of a child’s learning and development
• preschoolers who were given keyboard lessons improved their special temporal reasoning
• children learn vocabulary and language not from a dictionary or worksheet, but from conversation and song
• children learn songs not from reading music, but from singing with someone who loves to sing
• children learn hope, kindness and cooperation not by being told, but by experiencing
• creative activity is a source of joy and wonder, it enables children to touch, taste, hear and see the world
• children construct their understanding of the world around, music, games, drawing, dramas and imagination
• visual representation is what mathematical concepts are about.  It inevitably leads you to figures, shapes and forms which are best illustrated through art

The Arts engage all senses:

• involve a variety of modalities including kinesthetic, auditory and visual
• arts activities early in life help develop children’s brains for successful learning
• brain scans show that virtually the entire cerebral cortex is active while musicians are playing

The benefits of an Arts Education:

• learn more effectively in all other academic areas of school curriculum
• experience greater meaning, excitement and depth while learning
• score higher on both verbal and math sections of SAT testing
• achieve higher levels of academic success in college
• are four times more likely to win an academic award
• are eight times more likely to receive a community service award
• are three times more likely to receive a school attendance award
• are four times more likely to participate in a math or science fair
• a study by the Arts Education Research Center at NYU shows that achievement test scores in academic subjects improve when the arts are used to assist learning in mathematics, creative writing and communication skills

In conclusion:

The arts are another way of looking, another way of perceiving and another way of knowing.  The arts develop a sense of craftsmanship, quality task performance and goal setting skills needed for success in the classroom and beyond.  As a society we must develop children who are productive, happy, well adjusted citizens, rather than kids who can just pass a test and get through school.  We need to prepare children to think creatively, skillfully and outside the box.  An arts education is vital in accomplishing this and to help every student to achieve to his/her potential.