Art for Special Needs Children
Art provides an excellent avenue for exploring your life and feelings. Imagine being filled with thoughts and emotions but unable to express them. Children who have problems with speech, language, and motor skills struggle with verbalizing what they feel and need. This is frustrating for the children, upsetting for their parents, and challenging for their educators. This is where art helps to put your emotions into visuals through paintings, drawings, or other creative outcomes. This could lead to a journey of self-discovery and improved communication.
While learning visual art is important for all children, it is highly crucial for kids with special needs. Artistic activities directly exercise and strengthen the cognitive and physical skills that generally challenge special needs children, such as oral, tactile, visual, sensory, and motor skills. With the help of paint and colors, an educator can guide the children to communicate their thinking patterns. Artworks as a therapy that helps a child with special needs work through issues that trouble their development, like physical, emotional, mental, and behavioral conditions. In addition to providing a self-esteem boost, art helps children with learning differences, such as dyslexia, ADHD, and sensory disorders, communicate more effectively and express imaginations and feelings in a way that makes sense to them. There is increasing evidence in rehabilitation medicine and the field of neuroscience that art enhances brain function by impacting brain wave patterns, emotions, and the nervous system. Art can also raise serotonin levels. These benefits don't just come from making art, they also occur by experiencing art. Along with being a catalyst for skill development, art also teaches life lessons through a therapeutic method. Such a kind lesson is the power of planning. For special needs students, the planning that drives the artistic process is more important than the finished work. They experience the process of building the work and feelings of failure are eliminated which grows confidence in them even if the output doesn't live up to students' intentions. Discussions of ideas, and making a step-by-step on how to carry out the project enables them to see how a thoughtful collection of steps moves them steadily toward their goal.
Hence we see that participation of special needs children in creative arts reduces stress, which in turn enhances the ability to learn. Since there is more than one “right” answer, students have the opportunity to appreciate and enjoy each other’s work - that is social inclusion at its best. In addition, because procedural memory is more reliable than short-term memory, the daily drills and routines of art classes allow a child with special needs to retain that knowledge and experience.
Unable to tackle the emotions of your child? Let him/her get creative today and know-how to explore visuals from our expert instructors!
