Celebrating Children’s Development through Art
CDP Board Member, Laurel Snyder, and Staff are ready to greet guests at the Art Show
Children’s Day Hosts Inaugural Art Show-
Celebrating the Many Ways Art Supports Children’s Growth and Development
Every day, Children’s Day Preschool inspires creativity among students, families, and staff members. Countless creative activities are offered to our students and the outcome is always spectacular work. At CDP, the arts have always been an integral part of our curriculum. We weave the arts into our classrooms as well as teach specific creative skills and abilities. This is why we wanted to introduce our families, friends, and community to our First Annual Art Show!
For months, leading up to the Art Show, children, families, and staff were preparing for the festivities by making all types of art. Our students worked on clay models, acrylic paintings, recycled art projects, collages, recreating famous/popular paintings, and many more exciting pieces.
On May 24, 2022, Children’s Day Preschool held its first-ever art show.
Gallery-style displays filled with hundreds of our students, families, and employees’ artwork from the entire school year were presented to our guests, and they LOVED it.
We had plenty of fun activities laid out for our guests- including art stations so that guests could have some fun creating together. We had a name tag station where our guests were able to decorate their own name tags, opening fun conversations about names and personal interests. Other art stations included a collaborative canvas for our guests to work on and a clay station.
Guests had the opportunity to enjoy some light refreshments and network outdoors under a beautiful tent. The directors welcomed guests with a short introductory speech and thanked them for making our first annual art event a success by attending and sharing this moment with us. We premiered a special video (see video below) that highlighted the importance of art in preschool. The video focused on the many ways art enhances children's development - including fine and gross motor skills, creativity, problem-solving, cognition, social-emotional learning, and many other developmental areas.
Next- the highlight of the evening- a walkthrough of the art displayed gallery-style, throughout our playground area. Guests viewed the amazing art displays. There were several exhibits showcasing art from all of our classrooms ranging from sculptures, clay models, multi-media drawings/collage, acrylic painting, watercolors, and more! All of our guests were immersed in the children’s art and loved the stories behind each and every painting.
In addition to the children’s artwork, there were several displays that featured work done by parents/families and our staff. Art is central to the work we do at CDP- parents and employees are no exception! Parents participated in several workshops that focused on creating with their children (house building and recycle art using found objects) and how to use art for relaxation. Since the start of the pandemic, we have been offering self-care/support groups for our staff (teaching and non-teaching). These monthly groups give staff an opportunity to relax and unwind while strengthening their connections to each other. We hosted a staff art day- which many attendees spoke of as a highlight of the school year.
One of the most exciting moments of the event was revealing the winners of the silent auction! The auction featured one-of-a-kind art pieces created by several CDP students who love to paint. The bidding was fierce but friendly- and the children were proud to learn that guests wanted to buy their paintings.
We are so proud of our students and staff for all the hard work they’ve done to make this event become a reality, and we are so grateful to all of our guests that attended such a special event for the first time. The event’s mission was to enlighten our guests and our community about the importance of art integration in schools, especially in early childhood development.
The Amazing Benefits of Art
Here is what we’ve learned through experience about why arts integration is so important in the early years:
Art encourages neural connections. Children’s brain synapses fire away as they experiment and create.
Art develops problem-solving abilities. Open-ended, process-oriented art is nothing but an endless opportunity for making choices, coming to conclusions, and evaluating results.
Art promotes creativity. Solutions to major problems and breakthroughs of all kinds are linked to creativity.
Art builds fine & gross motor skills. Gripping a paintbrush, drawing dots and lines, mixing colors, cutting with scissors, controlling a glue stick, rolling playdough, tearing paper—all of these tasks require increasing amounts of dexterity and coordination, yet they are so fun and rewarding that children want to do them over and over.
Art promotes literacy and writing. Art tools provide early learners with pre-writing and pre-reading experiences, as they develop expressive and reflective skills that build visual literacy, enhance writing, and also promote print awareness, spatial relations skills, and verbal creativity.
Art helps kids connect. Art helps create a common ground for children who don’t know each other and who may or may not be interested in the same things. It can help people of all ages, races, abilities, and even languages engage in a shared activity.
Art helps kids understand themselves and their world. Children absorb incredible amounts of new information, and they need to process what they have learned in a safe, reflective way. Art allows them to explore feelings and deal with both daily and significant events. Feelings and ideas can be reduced to a manageable size and manipulated as desired. Movement, image, color, line, and imagination all help children express themselves in a multidimensional way that words cannot or do as well.
Thank You to the Art Show’s Sponsors and Donors!
Together, between event sponsorships, donations, and silent auction proceedings, we were able to raise over $3,100 for our Therapeutic Programming (art therapy, speech therapy, and supportive counseling for parents/families)!
CDP would love to thank all of our amazing Sponsors!
We had one Gold Level Sponsor, a compassionate friend of CDP, who wished to remain anonymous. Our Silver Sponsors are all fabulous business partners of CDP: Infinite Therapy Solutions, Managed Business Solutions, Maneri Law Firm, and Altomare Financial Group. We are extremely grateful to them for sponsoring our first-ever art show and could not have done it without their support.
Check out our video that talks about how CDP utilizes art throughout our program - for children, families, and staff. It highlights the many ways art enhances children's development - including fine and gross motor skills, creativity, problem-solving, cognition, social-emotional learning, and many other developmental areas.