Ten Tips for Parents
to Keep the Arts in their Children's Lives

Arts education is an important, fundamental component of education. It is in keeping with the mission of Macon Arts to ensure our local schools provide comprehensive, high quality arts education programs for our children.

How children learn and the role that the arts can play in that process has been studied for a number of years. The results increasingly conclude that study and participation in the arts not only produces knowledge of and proficiency in an art form, but affects the process of learning itself. The results show that the arts are cognitive. They embody and develop knowledge and mental skills, habits of mind, risk-taking, focus, and self-discipline. The following suggestions are designed to help parents keep the arts in their children's lives, at home, in school and in the community.

At home

1. Start sharing your interest in the arts at an early age. Listen to music in your home and go to live performances. Experience theater, dance and literary events together. Take your children to art exhibits. Make it a part of family outings. Professional theaters, libraries, symphony orchestras, and museums often have programs especially for children and at reduced ticket prices. Libraries are great local resources of art books, CDs, films and music.

2. Keep a journal of your next vacation, or even of short outings, like a trip to the zoo, a walk in the park, or a special birthday. Collect memorabilia, like tickets, flowers, shells, or pictures. Write a description of the event and paste the mementos in a spiral notebook or journal. For very young kids, take dictation of their words or make oral recordings to encourage their ideas and make connections with other experiences.

3. Keep a variety of art materials available to your children--crayons, colored paper, newsprint, paints, colored pencils and pastels. Encourage your kids to use them. Get a large box-the best are from furniture movers and let your children create their own imaginary environment. Give them a disposable camera to document a trip to school or the grocery store, dinnertime, or playing with friends so they start becoming more aware of their surroundings.

4. Choose a popular work of art, like Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. Talk about the painting and how night skies look. Recreate your own Starry Night. Think about how Starry Night would sound? How would it look as a dance? Could it be a Halloween costume?

At school

5. Educate yourself about the number and variety of art education programs offered at your child's school. Is there an arts credit requirement to graduate from high school? Are there achievement standards for the arts in your schools? Is there an expectation that every student will participate in the arts? Is there a budget to support the arts in your schools as well as appropriate space and equipment? Are all the art forms taught (music, visual arts, dance, drama, poetry, film, etc.)?

6. Ask Macon Arts and other community-based arts organizations to speak to your PTA leaders about the importance of the arts in children's education and to share the latest cognitive research. Invite local business leaders to attend. Organize a small group-just 2 or 3-to speak to your superintendent of schools or testify at your board of education meetings about the need for standards-based arts education for all children.

7. Volunteer to work on an arts project in your child's school, like helping to organize an arts day, assembling an arts and writing journal of students' work, or making arts related field-trips a richer experience by including pre-or post-event discussions or projects.

In the community

8. Take your children to the arts events in the community. Many are free and the quality is excellent. Look for community festivals of Shakespeare, music or the visual and performing arts. Attend your local high school's theater productions. Introduce your children to the arts through art camps, classes and music lessons. You will find excellent instruction in after-school programs or at mini-camps during school-breaks. Consider extra-curricular arts classes in music, dance, drama or the visual arts. Check out youth orchestras, choral groups, community bands and theater groups to give your children an opportunity to work with professional artists.

9. Participate in Macon Arts and other cultural institutions events to celebrate and focus on supporting arts education, both in and out of school. Draw attention to the importance of arts and culture in building a community and developing the next generation of citizens.

10. Attend budget hearings in your city and county. These leaders decide how your local dollars are spent and what kind of community you will have. Tell your leaders that public funding for the arts is key to keeping them available to every child. Take your children with you.