The Richly Artistic Curriculum: How Art Builds the Foundations of Learning

Abstract. Young children are, by disposition, artistic minds: they draw before they write, sing before they read, and pretend before they reason abstractly. This review examines what empirical research says about integrating visual arts, crafts, drama, and movement across the early childhood curriculum. Evidence is reviewed in five areas: the cognitive habits cultivated by serious art making; fine motor development through drawing and handwork and its documented links to later academic achievement; creativity and divergent thinking; drama and movement as vehicles for language and social cognition; and emotional expression, regulation, and school readiness. The review engages honestly with the limits of causal transfer claims while concluding that a richly artistic curriculum builds foundational capacities — motor, cognitive, and emotional — on which learning in any subject depends.

Debates about early education often treat art as ornament: a pleasant break between the "real" work of letters and numbers. A substantial body of developmental and educational research suggests this framing is backwards. For children between roughly three and seven years of age, artistic activity is not a rest from cognition but one of its primary media. When a four-year-old draws a family portrait, she is practicing symbolic representation, visuomotor coordination, planning, and emotional narration simultaneously. When a five-year-old acts out a story, he is exercising memory, language comprehension, and the ability to model another mind. The question worth asking is therefore not whether art belongs in the preschool curriculum, but what the evidence says about how artistic work builds the substrate on which later academic learning rests. This article reviews that evidence — including its genuine ambiguities — across five domains, and closes with practical implications for arts-integrated, play-based early childhood programs.

Arts and cognitive development: reading the evidence honestly

Any serious treatment of arts education must begin with the most rigorous — and most sobering — synthesis in the field. Winner and Hetland's Reviewing Education and the Arts Project examined 188 reports drawn from a pool of more than 11,000 studies to test the popular claim that arts study raises academic achievement (Winner & Hetland, 2000). Their meta-analyses found that most claimed transfer effects rested on correlational designs that could not rule out selection: children who study the arts differ in many ways from children who do not. Reliable causal support emerged in only a few areas, most notably the effect of classroom drama on verbal skills. A later review for the OECD reached a similar verdict: strong evidence that theatre education improves verbal and text-comprehension skills, suggestive but thinner evidence in most other domains, and far too little research on outcomes such as creativity and persistence (Winner, Goldstein, & Vincent-Lancrin, 2013).

Crucially, these authors did not conclude that arts education is dispensable. Their argument was that instrumental test-score claims are the wrong justification, and that the cognitive contribution of the arts lies elsewhere: in habits of mind. In their studio-thinking research, Hetland, Winner, Veenema, and Sheridan (2013) documented eight such dispositions taught in serious visual arts settings — among them close observation, envisioning what cannot yet be seen, engaging and persisting through difficulty, reflecting on one's work, and stretching beyond one's current capacities. These are not art-specific skills; they are general-purpose learning dispositions, and the arts are among the few settings where young children practice them willingly, repeatedly, and with intrinsic motivation. This review adopts that honest frame: the arts are examined below not as a test-preparation device but as a training ground for the motor, cognitive, and emotional foundations of learning.

The educated hand: drawing, handwork, and later achievement

The clearest quantitative case for early artistic activity comes, perhaps surprisingly, from research on fine motor skill. Grissmer, Grimm, Aiyer, Murrah, and Steele (2010) reanalyzed six longitudinal data sets to identify which kindergarten-entry capacities predict later achievement. Alongside early mathematics and attention, fine motor skill emerged as a strong and independent predictor of both later reading and later mathematics — a finding the authors proposed as a new school-readiness indicator, potentially reflecting shared cognitive underpinnings between fine motor control and the executive and reasoning processes that support learning.

Subsequent work sharpened the picture. Cameron and colleagues (2012) assessed 213 children before and during kindergarten and found that fine motor skill — specifically design copying, the ability to reproduce visual forms with a pencil — predicted achievement across multiple academic subtests even after controlling for executive function and background variables. Dinehart and Manfra (2013), studying 3,903 low-income preschoolers, found that both object-manipulation and fine motor writing tasks in preschool predicted reading and mathematics achievement in second grade, with pencil-and-paper tasks the stronger predictor.

These are predictive studies, not experiments, and they do not prove that adding drawing time causes achievement gains. But they establish that the hand's education matters academically, and artistic work is the natural curriculum of the hand. Drawing, painting, modeling with wax or clay, finger knitting, sewing, and beadwork — the staple activities of craft-rich early childhood programs — are precisely the tasks through which visuomotor integration, pencil control, bilateral coordination, and sustained manual precision develop. A child who spends years drawing freely and working with her hands arrives at formal schooling with the graphomotor foundation that handwriting, letter formation, and early mathematics notation require. In this domain, the artistic curriculum and the school-readiness curriculum are substantially the same curriculum.

Creativity and divergent thinking

Creativity research gives the artistic curriculum a second empirical anchor — and a warning. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, the field's most widely used measure of divergent thinking, have been normed on more than a quarter-million American children and adults since 1966. Kim's (2011) analysis of those norms found that creative thinking scores, after rising for decades, have declined significantly since 1990 even as IQ scores continued to rise — and that the decrease was most pronounced among the youngest children, kindergartners through third graders. Whatever its causes, this "creativity crisis" coincides with a period in which unstructured play and open-ended art making contracted in many early childhood settings.

Does divergent thinking matter for later life? Runco and Acar (2012) reviewed five decades of evidence and concluded that divergent-thinking tests, while not guarantees of adult creative achievement, are reliable and reasonably valid predictors of real-world creative performance. Divergent thinking — generating many, varied, and original responses to open-ended problems — is the measurable core of what educators call "out-of-the-box" thinking, and it is a distinct capacity from the convergent reasoning that intelligence tests reward.

Honesty requires noting what the evidence does not yet show: the OECD review found few rigorous studies testing whether arts training raises creativity scores, and judged the existing evidence inconclusive (Winner et al., 2013). What can be said is structural. Open-ended artistic tasks are among the only school activities whose basic format is divergent. A worksheet has one right answer; a blank page has thousands. A curriculum that daily asks children to decide what to paint, how to build, and which story to enact gives divergent production more practice trials than any other readily available classroom format. If educators wish to protect the capacity Kim found eroding, open-ended art making is the most defensible place to practice it.

Drama and movement: language, empathy, and the integrated curriculum

If visual art educates the hand, drama educates the tongue and the social mind — and here the causal evidence is strongest. Podlozny (2000) conducted seven meta-analyses of 80 experimental studies of classroom drama and found consistent positive effects on story understanding, reading readiness, reading achievement, oral language, vocabulary, and writing. Critically, gains transferred to new, non-enacted texts, indicating that drama builds general verbal capacities rather than mere familiarity with rehearsed material. This is the transfer finding that survived Winner and Hetland's skeptical review, and it lands squarely in early childhood territory: story enactment, puppetry, and dramatic play are already native to the preschool day.

Drama's benefits extend beyond language. Goldstein and Winner (2012) followed children and adolescents through a year of acting training versus other arts training and found that acting students showed significant gains in empathy, with adolescent actors also gaining on a naturalistic theory-of-mind measure. Stepping into a character's shoes appears to exercise the very capacity — modeling other minds — that underlies cooperation, narrative comprehension, and classroom social life.

Correlational evidence, read with appropriate caution, points the same direction at scale. Catterall, Dumais, and Hampden-Thompson (2012) tracked arts engagement across four federal longitudinal databases covering more than 70,000 young people and found that low-income students with arts-rich experiences showed better academic outcomes, higher college enrollment, and greater civic participation than low-arts peers, partially closing gaps with higher-income students. Selection effects cannot be excluded, but the pattern is consistent with the experimental drama literature: sustained, multi-form arts engagement travels with broad developmental advantage.

Emotional expression, regulation, and school readiness

Learning in groups requires managing feeling, and here early childhood arts research is unusually direct. Drake and Winner (2013) induced sad mood in children and found that drawing reliably improved mood — but through absorption and distraction rather than venting, and the effect held when children drew freely rather than copying. The finding matters pedagogically: the regulatory power of drawing lies in imaginative engagement, not in producing a prescribed product.

The most instructive program-level evidence comes from Settlement Music School's Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program, where credentialed artist-teachers deliver music, creative movement, and visual arts classes fully integrated with early learning instruction. Brown, Benedett, and Armistead (2010) found that children practiced school-readiness skills, including language skills, across both arts and early learning classes, and that children attending two years outperformed one-year attendees — a dosage pattern arguing against pure maturation. Brown and Sax (2013) then observed children's emotions directly: within Kaleidoscope, children showed more interest, happiness, and pride in arts classes than in traditional classes; compared with a demographically similar preschool, Kaleidoscope children showed greater positive emotion and greater growth in teacher-rated emotion regulation across the year.

A literature review commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts synthesized this and related work from 2000 to 2015, concluding that arts participation in early childhood — music, drama, dance, and visual art alike — is associated with stronger social skills such as sharing and cooperation and with reduced anxiety and aggression, while calling for more rigorous studies (Menzer, 2015). For young children, the arts appear to function simultaneously as expressive outlet, regulatory practice, and motivational engine — the emotional conditions under which academic learning becomes possible.

Practical implications

Several implications follow for early childhood programs, including play-based and Waldorf-inspired settings whose daily rhythms already center on drawing, painting, handwork, movement, and story:

1. Treat art as core curriculum, not enrichment. The fine motor evidence (Grissmer et al., 2010; Cameron et al., 2012; Dinehart & Manfra, 2013) implies that daily drawing, modeling, and craft work is school-readiness instruction, not a break from it.
2. Prefer open-ended making over product-copying. Both the mood-repair evidence (Drake & Winner, 2013) and the structure of divergent thinking favor tasks with many possible right answers over template crafts.
3. Use story enactment deliberately. Dramatization of stories is the single best-evidenced arts practice for language growth (Podlozny, 2000), and it requires nothing but time, a story, and imagination.
4. Integrate rather than isolate. The Kaleidoscope studies suggest that benefits accrue when the arts pervade the whole program rather than occupying a weekly slot (Brown et al., 2010; Brown & Sax, 2013).
5. Value habits of mind, and name them. Observation, persistence, envisioning, and reflection (Hetland et al., 2013) are legitimate learning outcomes that programs can document alongside academic skills.
6. Make honest claims. Following Winner and Hetland (2000), programs should not promise test-score miracles; they can accurately promise motor, linguistic, emotional, and dispositional foundations that formal schooling will draw upon.

Conclusion

The research reviewed here does not support the strongest advocacy claims sometimes made for the arts, and it does not need to. What it supports is something more fundamental: the drawing hand builds the writing hand; enacted stories build comprehension and empathy; open-ended making exercises the divergent thinking our best measures show to be declining; and artistic work gives young children daily, joyful practice in expressing and regulating emotion. These are not decorations on the curriculum. They are the foundations of learning itself — motor, cognitive, social, and emotional — and a curriculum that honors children's artistic minds lays those foundations deliberately, one painting, one puppet play, and one handmade thing at a time.

References

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