The current study explores the impact of visual arts education on early childhood, highlighting its role in enhancing creativity, imagination, and emotional expression in pre-school children. It explores the perspectives of pre-school teachers on the importance of visual arts in children's development and the challenges they face when integrating…

The present study reports findings on pre-service teachers' thinking during planning and implementing play-based art activities. "Thinking" (in the present study) is informed by discourses emphasising art teaching and learning in relation to play and theoretical assumptions conceptualising planning as "practice of knowing."…

This issue explores the nature of childhood by offering selections that re/imagine the idea of the child as art maker; inquire about the relationships between children and adults when they are making art; and investigate how physical space influences approaches to art instruction. Readers are invited to join a dialogue that questions long-standing…

Thinking about three- to six-year-olds rarely brings to mind an image of young children engaged in conversation in the formal setting of an art museum, yet these are actual comments made by preschoolers and kindergartners who spend time on the Mall in Washington, DC, visiting museums as part of their early childhood program. Today, an increasing…

Young Children and the Arts: Nurturing Imagination and Creativity examines the place of the arts in the experiences of young and very young children at home and in out-of-home settings at school and in the community. There is great need for development of resources in the arts specifically designed to introduce babies and toddlers to participatory…

Learning to imagine is a crucial step in symbol-making in early childhood. Uses examples of children's symbol-making to illustrate the process by which children understand the world around them. Considers how effectively aspects of children's learning environments facilitate children's exploration and their development of imagination. (MDM)

Examines the contributions of creativity and imagination to the total learning of the young child. Offers arguments against the myths that lead to deemphasis of the arts in curriculum. Recommends ways of refashioning schools to promote the expressive arts. (BB)

The experiences of a headmaster of a primary junior school situated in the older part of a large city are described. The point is made that the children in this school, with but little conscious awareness of what was beautiful, had within them an ability to create true beauty within all the media of the arts. This booklet is divided into eight…