A Visual Arts Curriculum for Montessori Early Childhood Setting

The visual arts education has great potential to promote young children's cognitive and intellectual skills. However, early childhood teachers often lack the content area knowledge and skills to provide high quality and meaningful visual arts experiences to young children. This visual arts curriculum was designed to facilitate early childhood teachers' expansion of their current visual arts practices by incorporating high quality and meaningful art viewing, art exploration and the art making experiences to promote young children's cognitive and intellectual development. The curriculum was evaluated by four Montessori early childhood teachers and two practicing artists and educators. The evaluators all agreed that the curriculum has the potential to help teachers gain confidence in teaching the visual arts to young children and may be applied by non-Montessori early childhood teachers as well.