Why Extracurricular Art Classes?
1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
-Elliot Eisner “The Arts and the Creation of Mind”
“Through the transformative process of creative expression, art learners generate artistic ideas that can be elaborated, refined, and finally shaped into meaningful images and structures.”
-Renee Sandell “Using Form+Theme+Context for Rebalancing 21st-Century Art Education
“In visual arts, the purpose of education is to enable the learner to become visually literate and expressive at a level consistent with their intellectual, emotional, and physical development.”
“Exploration of their imagination is as highly valued as awareness of their immediate surroundings.”
“Eye and hand coordination increase through the manipulation of art media and tools.”
“From creating typically rudimentary forms and using limited linear symbols for objects, students move toward developing a rich and detailed vocabulary of shapes to express thoughts and ideas.”
“Visual arts encourages children to go beyond ‘I like it” to explain what they enjoy about a particular work of art.”
“Emphasize joyful exploration and discovery.”
-NC Arts Education Website
Mini Monets 
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