Tune in to a Neighborhood program any day, and you'll find an appreciation for all kinds of art forms -- from painting to architecture, from cooking to crafts, from dance to drawing, from pottery to music to marble sculpting, to imagining! While some weeks focus on specific artistic avenues, like music, art, and dance, every day in the Neighborhood, children can find encouragement for their own creative ideas. On many days, children get to know talented artists and musicians when Mister Rogers visits with them.

Expose Children to Different Art Forms

In this week of programs about Celebrating the Arts, appreciation for the arts goes even broader. It includes a wide smorgasbord of art forms -- drawing, quilting, pottery, weaving, sculpting, dancing, and videography. With it all, Mister Rogers helps children appreciate the fact that art comes from within: our ideas of what we create are part of who we are inside. Showing pictures of the Neighborhood Trolley made by several children, Mister Rogers comments on how different each drawing is because each child is unique.

Playing drums isn't for everyone, and neither is painting with watercolors. 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, so they may find one that's best for them.

Good Feelings in Making Art

The variety of art also includes simpler attempts, like Mister Rogers' design from fabric pieces pasted onto paper and Daniel Tiger's mobile from paper clips and construction paper. It's the good feeling of making something out of one's own ideas that's important. Just trying can be fun, but it can take a lot of practice to do a work of art really well.

You have many opportunities every day to foster creativity in the children in your care. By offering raw materials, a variety of expressive forms, and by applauding children's efforts, you are giving them the best prize of all -- good feelings about themselves. And watch how they turn your kindness around by passing on kindness and appreciation to others around them.

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