The Gift of Creativity

The holidays are a favorite time of year for many of us – full of friends, family, good food and reflecting on a year of milestones.  It’s also a time when we look ahead to the New Year, anticipating all the great things to come.

Students work from smART stART 2009

Here at Young Audiences, Woodruff Arts Center, we are preparing to kick off the eighth year of our smART stART program this January and wanted to create a space that delivered real time evidence of the power of arts education through the lens of smART stART.  We hope this blog not only keeps you informed about all the great things happening through the program, but also excites you to all the learning potential made possible through the arts.


For those of you who might be unfamiliar with smART stART, here’s a brief overview of the program’s main cornerstones:

• An arts based approach to teaching early literacy
• All major disciplines represented (Music, Dance, Theatre and Visual Arts)
• Lessons delivered by a Young Audiences Teaching Artist in a sequential residency format
• Program presented to kindergarten students in Title I metro Atlanta schools

Each year the program supports a specific literacy objective. This year, we’ve selected the Georgia Performance Standard ELAKR6, specifically focusing on a child's ability to retell stories to include beginning, middle and end.

The arts have a unique ability of bridging the gap that exists in a child's ability to listen to a story and then be able to tell that same story.  They provide children with an opportunity to hear, internalize and synthesize a story, and then express that same story with a new understanding.  By incorporating an art discipline into this classroom instruction, we are able to broaden the power and impact of orally presented text by allowing children to take ownership and create new understanding of the concept through a given art form.

So what about the art?  What about the creative process?  During a fall planning process Young Audiences staff work with teaching artists to plan and design lesson that meet given arts objectives in addition to the literacy objective.  Since we work with teaching artists in different disciplines, we want the artist to chose the arts objective they feel best integrates with the literacy objective.

Student work from smART stART 2009

Over the next few months as the program is delivered, we will be sharing anecdotal evidence from the smART stART program – along with pictures and videos from different classroom residencies – in hopes of really illustrating the transforming power of the arts and the value of smART stART in increasing literacy throughout metro Atlanta. We also hope this starts and encourages a continuation of topics like arts education assessment, integrating the arts, the power of co-teaching, child centered learning, and student engagement, to name a few.


We welcome your thoughts and ideas about both smART stART and arts education as a whole – so please feel free to post your ideas in the comments section! We look forward to hearing from you.

Until then, Happy Holidays from everyone at Young Audiences.