Why is Art Important?

At my school, we have a program called Leadership Academy that was introduced when our principal began working at our school. It is a wonderful program where 40 minutes of time on Fridays is dedicated to rotating between Leadership Academy (or clubs for our younger students in the school), SEL lessons, or our buddy program.

Leadership Academy allows students from 3rd-5th grade to take on a leadership role in our school. Students can fill out a form at the beginning of the school year to request to become a part of a team where they have scheduled times out of the week to complete a “job” in our school. Every student in the school in this age group is provided with a team that they can be a part of, providing a sense of belonging and responsibility for each of our students. An example of one of our leadership teams is the Lunch Leadership Team, who come in to the lunch room to help younger students open packaging, provide them with silverware or napkins if they forgot to grab them, and help ensure they are following lunch room expectations.

Naturally, I am the team leader for the Art Leadership Team, since I am the art teacher at my school. The students in my Art Leadership Team help hang and take down student artwork on bulletin boards in the hallway as well as complete helpful tasks around the art room, such as cleaning paintbrushes and sharpening pencils.

Today, during our Leadership Academy team meeting, I explained to my students that I am working on my Master’s degree and I had an assignment I would love to have their help with! I explained how I would be making a post about the work we completed in our meeting today! We joked around a bit about how they were “doing my homework” today, which gave us all a good laugh! Then I continued on to explain that they would be filling out a worksheet where they discuss why art is important. I told them that there is no right or wrong answer for this question and that art can be important to people in many different ways!

All of my art leaders chose my Art Leadership Team as one of their top three choices when they submitted their Leadership Academy applications at the beginning of the school year. Therefore, a majority of my art leaders have a strong passion and a love for art. I was excited to see what their answers would be due to this. Below, I have provided my students answers to this question so that you can see why my art leaders believe art is important!

I have also provided translations of the students answers as we all know that, at times, students writing and spelling can be difficult to decipher. They are still learning to do these things properly, and that's okay! I was perhaps a little older than I should have been myself when I was able to successfully spell the word "necessary"!

For privacy reasons, I will be referring to the students by the first initial of their name!

S says: Art lets you express your creativity!

Note from Mrs. Trainor: You may also notice that this playful kiddo made sure to make it known that she was, in fact, "completing Mrs. Trainor's homework" by labeling it as such!

Z says: I think art is important because you can show a creature that you made up!

Note from Mrs. Trainor: I just love the little creature Z included with her answer! Z always makes the most adorable little creatures when completing her art projects. It made me chuckle to see her give this fitting answer!

L says: Art is important to me because it helps me get better at drawing and it makes me want to draw more and it helps me be calm and it also makes me want to teach my sister and my brain likes just concentrating on the art that I'm doing and that's why I think art is important.

Note from Mrs. Trainor: It just warms my heart that sweet L wants to help teacher her sister to make art!

F says: You use your imagination!

Note from Mrs. Trainor: I love F's use of bubble letters, here!

H says: Because (with) art you can express your feelings.

Note from Mrs. Trainor: Once again, you can see this student follow suit with S's jokes and made sure to label her paper as "Mrs. Trainor's homework" and included a picture of me to go with it!

G says: Art is important because it can help calm you down. Art can make life beautiful. Art can make life bright and colorful, instead of gray. I hate gray. It's so boring.

Note from Mrs. Trainor: This one warmed my heart and gave me quite the laugh at the same time! It starts out so positive, then suddenly we're hating on the color gray!

I hope you all enjoyed hearing why my students feel art is important! If you find yourself here on my blog, please leave a comment! I would love to see why you believe art is important!