In today’s academic scenario, the creative arts have all but entirely disappeared from the Indian education system. Learning Art and Craft doesn’t solely foster the creative development of a child, but also assists in advancing and refining his or her core skills, which help further academic achievements as well as help in developing their entrepreneurial skills. Cognition refers to the brain’s conscious mental activities, and includes thinking, reasoning, understanding, learning, and remembering.
Therefore, imbibing a healthy interest in Arts and Crafts, early on, in a child, can give him or her several key advantages while preparing them as future entrepreneurs, some of which are:
Improved Bilateral Coordination
Bilateral coordination is the ability to simultaneously utilize both sides of the brain and is a good indicator of cognitive progress. Children who struggle with coordinating both sides of their bodies face difficulty in completing daily tasks like tying their shoes, conducting motor activities like stringing beads and carrying out visual-motor tasks such as writing. This coordination ability is enhanced by creative activities since they simultaneously activate several areas of the brain through absorbing tasks like using play-doh ‘tools’, and lacing yarn through holes, and various other craft activities. This will help in developing the decision-making skills in the child’s brain.
Enhanced Focus
All forms of art, including sketching or dancing, require and train the perseverance and focus of a child, making them absolutely essential in enhancing his or her cognitive development. When teachers encourage children to put their creativity in practice they increase their capacity of focusing and grasping the subject matter.
Strengthening of Visual Learning
For young kids, painting, sculpting, and sketching play important roles in helping evolve and engage their visual skills, while also improving their knowledge of spatial relations. When children draw items that are specific and correlated, like objects which are thick and thin, smooth and rough, far and near, and so on, they are able to easily understand the concepts of distance, size, comparison, and textural differences, in an elementary manner, which augments their fundamental visual analysis skills. As such, Arts and Crafts help educate students on interpretation and criticism, showing them how to make choices based on visual information, which is certainly beyond the scope of pure academics. Visual processing and spatial relations are crucial in performing basic skills like riding a bike or playing ball and an underdeveloped skill capacity may greatly hinder this functioning.
Advancing Problem Solving skills
When we draw, we have to carefully depict several specific attributes of an object, in order to portray it with utmost accuracy. The same goes for children, when they draw a house and a tree, for instance, using their cognitive skills to determine where the door of the house should be, and what should be the relative size of the person, or what kind of emotions he or she is displaying. These entail problem-solving and decision-making skills which are being constantly applied during these exercises, and hence, are assimilated while producing artistic projects.
Pursing Arts and Crafts allows a child to exercise flexible thinking and incorporate a number of extremely crucial cognitive skills.
This article is written by Dr. Amrita Vohra, Principal of GIIS Chinchwad.
