Music, Arts, and Crafts Ideas

Montessori Art focuses on the process and allowing the child to truly experience art on his own terms. Children are born naturally inclined to art. Teachers’ and parents’ job is to nurture that natural tendency towards creativity. Art is about the experience the child has with the materials, the mediums, and the textures that ultimately create the art. This idea is known as process art.

You won’t find crafts or step by step art projects in a Montessori environment. More often than not, an art project is integrated into another area of the classroom such as language (storytelling), history (visual representations of time), math (beadwork), and geography (tracing & coloring maps). (From: carrotsareorange.com)

How to support creativity in a child:

• Be open-minded about messes, mediums, and the direction of the child

• Learn about art processes and materials

• Understand what it means to be creative and the myriad of definitions that exist

• Read about the impact of creativity on brain development

• Embrace the idea of “failure” as an opportunity

• Prepare the environment for the creative art process

• Prepare yourself with appropriate responses to a child’s work

Some helpful resources include:

• How to talk to kids about their art (Artful Parent.com)

• Ten Easy to Do Puffy Paint Activities for Kids (carrotsareorange.com)

• “This A Way, That A Way” (fun sing-along for children)