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CHILDREN'S STUDIO SCHOOL

Inspired by the belief that the arts are basic to
human development, in 1977 the Children's Studio School
embarked on a pioneer program to educate children through a
fully arts-based curriculum. Local artists, employed as
teachers, tested the hypothesis that children working in a
daily arts curriculum develop exceptional abilities to think
and act, analyze and interpret, perceive and express, and
create and evaluate.

Today, that hypothesis has become a tradition.
Each day throughout the year, ten artists/teachers trained in
the School's aesthetic/conceptual approach, educate a
multicultural community of young children in and through
dance, drama, visual art, creative writing, music and
architecture. The School's extensive curriculum challenges
children to participate in the world around them -- to make
sense of and act upon their perceptions. Through art-making,
they come to know themselves, and attain a deeper
understanding and greater appreciation of their own and
other's cultures.

Children's Studio School recognizes that children
between the ages of two and seven assimilate information
from and about their environment at an immeasurable rate,
forming a foundation for lifelong learning. In finding
creative solutions to problems presented in all arts
diciplines, children explore the world as artists and
develop their own aesthetic interpretations. The children's
creations are derived from their natural pallette of
interests: big things, scary things, rough things, surprises,
animals, water, their own bodies; and things they do best:
running, climbing, dancing, constructing, destructing,
painting, dreaming, touching, talking, acting... Learning
becomes an integrated process of doing, sensing, feeling, and
knowing -- empowering children to question, value and
transform their environment.

Holding to the belief that Children's Studio
School and Washington fortify each other, the School is as
much involved in absorbing the community as it is in
nurturing it. As a cultural collaborator, the School
shares with the community the artistic expressions of rich
young minds from diverse cultural backgrounds by opening its
Gallery and studios to visitors; exhibiting throughout the
city; and offering arts workshops for neighborhood children,
parents and other community members.