Arts Impact partners with community based early learning centers, ECEAP and Headstart programs and the Department of Children, Youth and Families to support arts integrated learning for our youngest children, from toddlers through Grade 3. The arts are one of the first languages young children speak and are a proven way to build kindergarten readiness skills and close opportunity and achievement gaps before they grow. Arts Impact teaches early childhood educators, family support staff, parents and guardians how to use visual and performing arts to help young learners develop skills in early literacy, math, science and social emotional learning. In Arts Impact classes led by teaching artists from the community, children dance addition and subtraction, act the beginning, middle and end of a story, and paint their changing emotions. In addition to learning academic vocabulary and ideas, young children develop gross and fine motor skills, growth mindset and joy in learning through the arts.
Creative Development
In 2022, In partnership with the Multicultural Child and Family Hope Center (MCFHC) in Tacoma, Arts Impact developed Creative Development. Creative Development is an art and sensory learning curriculum for infants and toddlers providing stimulating multiple sensory experiences in a safe environment. The first few years of a child’s life is the most fertile for learning. Creative Development’s curriculum explores what an infant and toddlers sees, hears, feels, and touches through dance, movement, music, facial and body expressions, and the visual arts to promote healthy brain and social development. The arts provide multi-sensory and sensory rich experiences that stimulate different areas of the brain, building synaptic connections, promoting cognitive, social, emotional, and developmental benefits. The arts encourage creativity, imagination, critical thinking, and problem solving. The arts promote social skills, collaboration, self-confidence, emotional expression, self-awareness, and fine and gross motor skills. The arts allow infants and toddlers ways to make meaning of their environment and provide opportunities to explore and appreciate the beauty of other cultures, nature, people, and objects in their world. Arts Impact’s staff and early learning Artist Mentors, along with the MCFHC staff, infant and toddler lead and support teachers, partnered in 2023-24 for Creative Development’s pilot year in the classroom.
IN 2020, Arts Impact collaborated with the Washington State Arts Commission (ArtsWA) to develop an arts integrated professional learning program for early childhood educators across the state called Creative StART. The legislatively funded project seeks to create site-based, culturally grounded arts integration plans for our youngest learners in diverse communities around our state.
For more information, or to bring Creative Development or Preschool programs to your classroom, school, or district, contact Grace Washington at [email protected].
