ART-ful Teaching
-- how to introduce art to children with special needs
Art can be a wonderful, expressive medium for all children, but for those who have language, emotional or neurological challenges, art activities can be especially meaningful. Art can open the lines of communication for children with limited verbal skills, provides opportunities for tactile development, visual organization, fine motor control and hand-eye coordination. Producing a vibrant, tangible product fosters their self-esteem. And, many children who experience cognitive, emotional or other learning challenges are highly gifted artistically and even go on to make a living doing so.
Teachers and parents can encourage children to explore their art potential in many ways. These creative ideas come from art therapists and paraeducators:
Don't assume that a child has any prior experience with art. Some children may relate only to realistic, photographic images and need instruction in working with illustration and abstract images. Begin introducing your child to drawing by taping a clear laminate piece over a photograph and having her trace it, using a felt pen that wipes off easily. This helps her learn about edges, shapes and concrete objects, and she can be successful with the finished tracing.
Joint drawings can encourage a child to add detail they might not think of on their own. The adult can start the drawing – say, the house – then the child and adult take turns adding details like windows, door, grass, flowers, a weathervane, chimney, birds, the mailbox, clouds, a bike in the driveway. Let it go on as long as the child maintains interest. Then come back to it another day and add yet more details. Pair verbal language with each detail as it's drawn; practice spelling, pronouns or imagination. The educational options are endless.
Provide a model to help the child draw something specific. "When a fabric mural was being created with an artist-in-residence, my student was to choose an animal to depict," says art therapist/paraeducator Lucy Courtney. "He had a picture of the real animal he chose but still his drawing was not a recognizable ant. Then I drew the ant as he watched. I left him alone and he drew an ant that looked very much like mine – a believable ant."
Step by step drawing is also helpful. This can be a whole class activity with the teacher leading.
Offer different mediums. One child may like the control and pressure needed to use colored pencils. Another child may prefer the ease of felt pens – instant color without needing to use pressure. Some may enjoy chalk drawing, particularly if you paint an untextured wall with chalkboard/blackboard paint and provide chalk sticks of varying widths and colors. Crayons may be more difficult; it is harder to control the edges, and pressure is needed to get good color. Paint is even harder to control, and has the complication of the "messy factor." Art projects have to be achievable and make sense to the child. Otherwise, the task may get done but with an obvious disconnection, ergo no benefit.
Art can segue into writing. Daily journal writing was painstaking for one little second-grade boy. Each day he would draw a train car with the single sentence, "My train is good." When pressed to write a second sentence, he would add something generic like "It is cool." Courtney noticed that while the writing was static, the drawings were taking on ever more detail: cars became either boxcars or flat cars with added features on the wheels, more cars were added to the train, people began appearing in them. The drawings continued to progress, even as the writing stayed stagnant – until the following year, when the floodgates opened and the child began writing a screenplay!
Art can open the door to communication for children who are nonverbal or otherwise cannot express their feelings. In one heartbreaking example, a paraeducator worked on a clay project for weeks with a nonverbal child. The school suspected child abuse, suspected the father, but couldn't prove anything. Week after week the child worked soundlessly away on a sculpture of a dark, gaunt figure. One day, the silence broke. He noticed another child watching him and said, "My mom is mean to me."
Art can provide a visual medium for story creation. Children can be encouraged to create characters and several drawings depicting their characters in various situations. Concepts like sequencing and predicting can be taught using these visual representations.
Ellen Notbohm is a three-time ForeWord Book of the Year finalist and author of one of the autism community's most beloved books, Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. To contact Ellen or explore her work, visit www.ellennotbohm.com. This article is excerpted from 1001 Great Ideas for Teaching and Raising Children with Autism or Asperger's, by Ellen Notbohm and Veronica Zysk.
This article originally appeared in the September 2006 issue of Genesee Valley Parent Magazine. Copyright 2011.
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