Creativity is key if a person wants to be successful in life. Being connected with the creative world is something that everyone should be doing from a young age. Art is a great way for children to develop their creativity, the benefits that it offers affect children in a positive way – in ways that one would never expect.
In this blog, we will discuss what these benefits are
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- Enabling brain development
- Unlocking problem solving
- Helps children express themselves
- Builds fine motor skills
- Mental health
How does art benefit the human brain?
Brain development is affected by many factors that surround a child’s life, for example, their relationships, experiences and environment. Throughout a child’s life, they are creating a million neural connections each second. These connections help the brain function in everyday life. Art opens the door for children, giving them many opportunities to create different memories that help develop these connections.
The way art does this is through the five senses – sight, touch, smell, sound and taste – and depending on what art activity they do will highlight one of these senses. By mixing colours or using their hands to create objects, these activities help a child brain to develop and register an object with a name due to the neural connections.
With art guiding a child’s development, it ultimately helps them with their education.
How does art benefits children’s problem-solving skills?
Many people see art as a creative activity and that it will only benefit that area, when the truth is, it affects other aspects of a child’s life. Through art, children develop the tool of being resourceful, a useful skill to have when they are older and facing different daily challenges. Art does this by allowing children to explore the creative world in their way and understand that you can use different mediums, paint or chalk, and still have an amazing result.
Art opens the door for children to see that there are many different ways to solve a problem. Creativity helps children become flexible thinkers, making them think all different ways about an issue before fixing it.
And surprisingly, creativity is useful for academic studies, such as maths. The problem-solving skill that children develop uses the same part of the brain that we use for maths. Looking at this in the long-term, art benefits children’s education immensely.
How does art benefits children in expressing themselves?
It is a privilege to be able to express our opinions and feelings. Art allows children to express themselves in a safe way by letting them explore different materials and colours. With art doing this, it helps children develop confidence as they discover that the mistakes they make in art, such as using the wrong colour, can lead to having a new idea.
Having confidence makes children feel comfortable with creatively expressing themselves. When encouraging children to explore the world of art, we are actually motivating them to be confident enough to understand themselves.
Art is vast. Two people will study a painting and interpret it differently from one another. The same two people will look at a bowl of fruit and might use different colours and materials to each other, but still create a masterpiece. Most importantly, each artist will put a bit of themselves in their art, something that children will learn to do as well.
With art helping children develop self-expression, it allows them to be confident enough in other areas of their lives if they have to explain their feelings about a certain topic.
How does art benefits children’s fine motor skills?
Fine motor skills are vital for every child to develop, giving them the ability to do small tasks that are done by hand. Art activities, such as picking up the paintbrush, using pencils to scribble enables the muscles in the fingers to grow and be strong. Children enjoy these activities, resulting in them doing these fun tasks again and again. Repeating these tasks develops dexterity and coordination.
Although these activities may seem small, the improvement in their fine motor skills can be seen anywhere after. For example, scribbling eventually turns into shapes that then mould into letters.
With art helping children develop their fine motor skills, it guides children through their education in a successful way.
How does art benefits children’s mental health?
As mentioned before, art allows children to be able to express themselves. Being given the chance to do this makes children feel comfortable communicating their feelings that improve their mental health. But not only that, art is seen as therapeutic and that it relaxes people as they have a chance to close off the world and create a masterpiece of colours.
Teaching children that art is a safe place for them to express themselves, helps them improve their mental health in a long run. Having positive mental health affects other areas in a child’s life in a great way as well. For example, children are more likely to achieve a higher grade if they feel mentally healthy, as they are seen to be able to focus better and not freak out too much when they are stressed.
As seen above, art impacts a child’s educational life hugely. Creativity can be a breakaway for children to escape the stress of school, as well as having fun and expressing themselves through colours.
What would be even better is if parents have the chance to witness all the excitement their children is having, whilst learning all of these useful skills that will benefit them for years to come.
We have some fantastic news.
We have created the Splento App, a way for art clubs to easily communicate with parents throughout the sessions. Art teachers will be able to snap a photo of a child creatively expressing themselves and upload it to the app for the parent to see. This highly secure app only allows parents to see photos if their child is in it. Parents are the ones in charge and they state if anyone else is allowed to see their children’s photos.
The Splento App allows parents to see all the exciting artistic activity their child gets to do whilst they are busy at work.
If you are a parent and interested in this app but want to learn more about what it can do for you, then Exploring the Splento App for parents has more detail about the Splento App.
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