The Benefits of Art for Students
Why should students learn art? What are the benefits of art for students? I will let you know the benefits of art for students below. Here’s why you should teach your students or kids art! There are so many benefits of art for students to learn!
Benefits of Art For Students
There are so many benefits of art for students. Art is more than creating something pretty. Art has the power to be a lot more than just beautiful. Below are the benefits of art for students. If you are a homeschool parent - I highly encourage you to teach your child art beyond tutorials, crafts and colouring pages. If you are a teacher, even if you don’t teach art as a subject you can easily incorporate art into your lessons and projects by giving your students a chance to be creative! Let’s go into the details below!
Critical Thinking
Through analyzing art, reflecting and questioning their own art, students can think critically about why they like an artwork or not. Critical thinking is an important skill that goes beyond the classroom and transfers into life and the workplace. Being able to think critically and decide what information is factual and relevant is really important especially when so much of our information is absorbed through social media. We want our students and children to be able to think critically and think for themselves to discern information.
Analyzing an artwork and figuring out what the artwork represents, communicates, how the art feels, why the artist made decisions, why the artwork is relevant to the time period - allows the student to practice and hone their critical thinking skills.
You can do this by teaching art history or visiting a local art gallery or museum.
Creative Thinking
It is important when teaching art to go beyond a tutorial. Tutorials are great for teaching specific art skills. Like my acrylic painting YouTube channel- on this YouTube channel I focus on creating painting tutorials for beginners (kids included). While tutorials are valuable, easy and free if you are only relying on tutorials the student is not learning and developing their creativity or creative thinking skills.
It is good to have a mix of tutorials where they can learn and hone their skills and open-ended art projects to use their creativity.
Another problem with tutorials, is that the student is copying the artist who created their tutorial. Often, the painting the student makes is the same or similar to the original painting/or artwork in the tutorial. The student has no real opportunity to make decisions for how the artwork should look. These decisions are a powerful component of creative thinking.
Problem Solving
Another benefit of art for students is to teach them problem solving skills. This is another important life skill for students to have.
In art if something doesn’t look the way the student intended they can begin to problem solve and think about -how can I fix this? How can I make it look better? They can begin to experiment, trial and error, practice, test and see how they can make improvements to their art all while learning problem solving skills along the way.
Communication Skills
Communication skills is another benefit of art for students. Art communicates ideas and thoughts. An artist creates an artwork for a reason - to express something.
Let your students think about what they want to make and why they want to make it. What do they want to communicate with their art? How do they want the viewer to feel about their work? You can incorporate writing or public speaking with their art so they can express their thoughts, ideas, and decisions.
Effort/Attention to Detail
In art there is a difference between good art and amazing art and that is the effort/attention to detail that is involved. By giving students time and sharing your expectations clearly with what you are looking for in terms of the craftsmanship for certain supplies.
Allow students to focus and work on finishing and perfecting a piece of art to the best of their ability. This helps to create a strong work ethic that can be transferred to other subjects and the workplace.
You can choose to have projects last longer allowing students to put in the necessary effort to really refine their work!
Decision Making Skills
In art, there are a lot of decisions to be made like - what supplies to use? What techniques to use? How to hang or photograph the art? What the art means? What colour to use? Etc. All of these decisions are important and change the outcome of the artwork.
Through creating art, students are able to make decisions and hone their decision making skills.
For more art teaching resources and freebies to use with your students or children - check out my TPT store by clicking the button below. I have resources for grades 1-12.
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If you know a teen who is interested in art school - click the button below to download my free guide for 10 tips to create an art portfolio that stands out for school applications.
Want to improve your acrylic painting skills or know someone who does - download my free beginner painting guide by clicking on the button below!