Crafting With Six-to-Eight Year Olds

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From approximately age six to about eight years, children become focused on being efficient senders of messages, using the symbol systems of art, music, dance, and drama. Products become as important to children as the process, and they want their artistic expression to be competent, comprehensive, and to "speak" even to strangers. Because of this desire for artistic competence, Wolf and Gardner (1980) referred to this period as the craftsperson stage. "Craftspersons" have a desire to adopt methods by which their messages and meanings can as clear as possible. Such messages/meanings usually hold fast to culturally determined forms of expression. Within one culture, for example, the diversity of forms can range from a child illustrating the traditional Hungarian costume she might wear at a folk festival to depicting a space-age craft inspired by a modern film.

Children's desire to produce competent, comprehensible products inspires an interest in mastering skills. However, depending upon their experiences with each of the arts domains, such as taking dance or drama classes outside school hours, learning the piano, or attending art studio lessons, children's abilities can range from childlike schematic symbolization (e.g., a prototypical house and tree drawn from memory) to highly competent works (e.g., a still life of a plant drawn from observation). Children often seek aid to improve their skills, benefit from direction and educational guidance, and can make significant artistic progress in a relatively short period.

However, if children have few or no opportunities to receive artistic guidance through the support of teachers and arts mentors, their artistic products can become predictable and conventional or centered on being as "realistic" as possible, with less regard for the expressive components of art making.

With increased understanding of the adult world, school-aged children begin to adopt the attitudes and values of "grown-ups" in many areas, including the arts, but they also develop their own values and tastes. School children influence one another's tastes about which CDs should be coveted, which actor or rock star is the best, whether it is cool for boys to dance, and what types of clothes suit the image they want to present. Effectiveness within the group can become more important than personal belief systems and, consequently, fantasy often becomes internalized if there are not opportunities for externalized, symbolic forms of expression. In other words, the dramatic play and spoken narratives of their previous stage of development may be replaced with contemplative thought and daydreaming if opportunities are not provided for imaginative and expressive outlets, through music, dance, drama, and art.

Peer pressure and concern about being shunned from the group can cause children's personal efforts to become less accessible to their audience. However, with sensitive guidance from teachers, exposure to the world of the arts and the creators and performers within it, and processes where children can feel competent through making, presenting, and responding to the arts, they can feel comfortable about the expressive aspects of their personal artistry. A general goal is to lead children to proficiency, but to ensure that their craftsperson behavior becomes a vehicle for expression rather than an end in itself. In other words, we can help children find a balance between technical skill and personal expression in the arts by demonstrating that both components are important and that finding an aesthetic balance between technique and expression is what makes good works of art, music, drama, and dance.

The intelligences generally work together in development, and one domain often complements and enhances another—the visual, aural, bodily-kinesthetic, and personal domains often interface. Consequently, educational processes should help children reach personal goals that are appropriate to their particular spectrum of intelligences, learning styles, and preferred domains of learning, so that they feel engaged and competent and inclined to participate in school, and in life in general, in positive and constructive ways. The final segment discusses how domain-specific intelligence has implications for early childhood arts education in relation to young children's development.