Thoughts for the Week:

Everyone's art is unique! Different people find different ways of expressing who they are and how they feel. That's why it helps to expose children to many art forms and let them find one that's best for them. When we offer a variety of materials and applaud their efforts, children develop good feelings about themselves. Our ideas of what we create are part of who we are inside. Children find encouragement for their creativity when we show them we value the process of creating art as well as the final project.

Young children often don't have the words to tell us what they feel, but they can show us those feelings by the pictures they draw or the stories they create. Children's art can also tell us something about what they know. As children come to know their world better, their art becomes more and more realistic. But even when children create the same "thing," each one is different -- because each person looks at things differently.