Developmentally Appropriate Art and Play Curriculum for Early Childhood

Dance Standards and Early Childhood Arts Learning

The standard selected for this discussion comes from the area of Dance. Specifically, Grade K–4 Dance Standard 3 reads: Understanding dance as a way to create and communicate meaning. The Achievement Standard consists of the following objectives:

Even though this particular standard is intended for children in grades K through 4, the achievement standard is not too advanced to use, with some adaptation, with preschool children. The activities described below are planned with dance as the theme, and the medium for expression is visual art. By pairing movement with painting, even the youngest learners can engage with the core idea that the body — and, by extension, a brushstroke — can communicate feeling and meaning.

Adapting the K–4 Dance Standard for Preschool

Materials needed: non-toxic poster paints, brushes, poster paper on easels, several musical pieces with distinct tempos and melodic elements that would appeal to children and be likely to elicit movement, and rolls of art paper.

Activity Materials and Procedures

Procedures: The teacher will demonstrate the performance expectation before children are given paint and brushes of their own. First, the teacher will explain what she is going to do; then she will demonstrate; then she will do the activity in tandem with the children; and finally she will observe the children performing the task independently.

The teacher begins by moving to a piece of music, narrating aloud how it makes her feel, what her body is doing, and similar observations. She then plays the same music and paints instead of dancing, using words that convey the movements she performed while listening. The sequence proceeds as follows: music + dance, then music + paint, then hang up the children's paintings and discuss how the paint helps show what they hear — repeated with a new piece of music and clean sheets of paper.

The teacher may also choose to use rolls of art paper fastened to a horizontal surface — such as a whiteboard on wheels or the walls — in order to demonstrate the full length of a dance, showing leaping and twirling, slow curvy movements, fast choppy movements, and so on. Because choreography is complex and specific sequences of movement may be difficult for young children to remember, the use of paintings gives a tangible, visual quality to the otherwise temporal aspects of music and movement.

Resistance to Play in Educational Settings

A member of a teaching team can share the findings of research that supports the use of play as a way to enhance physical, emotional, and psychological development and health. The notion that play does not belong in early childhood education is, at its core, driven by a social and economic pressure to compete endlessly for the top of the socioeconomic ladder. Evidence of how these beliefs have disproportionately impacted parenting is widespread. In some social circles, parents are considered negligent if they do not schedule a child's day to be filled with enrichment activities. Children are not trusted to structure their own free time because they might not gain an advantage over their peers. Experts in play, however, argue that engaging in play is actually important for brain development and contributes to greater cognitive ability at all ages.

The related issue in educational settings is that standardized achievement test results are driving the curriculum, putting intense pressure on teachers, administrators, schools, and — not least — the students themselves to perform at ever higher levels. Pushing the curriculum ever downward by thrusting academic standards into the realm of early childhood education is symptomatic of how completely parents and educational institutions have accepted this competitive orientation.