Did you know that children who participate in music, theatre, art and dance are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement than those who don’t?  It’s true.

In a time when many schools are cutting back on their arts programs, there’s actually a lot more at stake than losing out on the opportunity to be entertained at the annual spring concert.

Study after study has shown that when arts are integrated into the curriculum, students are more motivated to succeed, develop a better memory and have a greater ability to concentrate on the tasks assigned to them.

In addition to the cognitive benefits, children that grow up exposed to the arts are more likely to form deeper emotional and cultural connections that enable them with new ways of seeing the world around them.

Ironically, companies looking to hire the best and the brightest having been touting “creativity” and “out-of-the-box thinking” as two key characteristics that they’re looking for in new hires… And yet, the traditional classroom’s standardized approach to teaching does not reward children that ‘colour outside the lines.’

At EMS, music, art, theatre and dance have a permanent place in our curriculum. We believe that self-expression and creativity have a critical role to play in our students’ overall development, and that activities like the school play help build confidence by teaching perseverance, collaboration, focus and accountability.  It’s hard work that also happens to be fun. The fact that parents get to be entertained by it is simply a bonus.

Interesting articles/videos on the subject:

10 Benefits of Arts Education

Ted Talk Video: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Our mission is to display our academic learning through the culminating activities of planning, preparing, and executing a fundraiser. The process and tasks involved help us practice and apply different things:

• Math concepts (budgeting, statement of accounting, profit & loss, recipe calculations)
• Language (collaboration, media literacy, marketing, communication)
• Art
• Teamwork
• Critical thinking and responsibility

Our goal is to raise funds which students work with to balance a bank account throughout the course of the school year. At the start of each individual fundraiser, we clearly outline our goal and use of funds. At the end of the school year, the funds are portioned out as set out in our campaign statements.”

– Katerina (age 12), Taijha (age 13), Thomas (age 12)

Watch how 3 year-old Jackson and 3 year-old Aya are learning how to not only recognize numbers, but truly comprehend what the values of those numbers represent.  (Oh, and by the way, the activity they are doing is actually laying the foundation for learning about the decimal system!)

“The guide or teacher must be sure to provide the child with the right tools at the right time in the child’s development to interest the child in mathematics. If interested, the child can discover relationships for him/herself where it is understood that abstraction is an individual process that cannot be forced”. – Dr. Maria Montessori

Lower Elementary students learning how to measure the size of a room using a non-standard unit of measurement  (Hint: If you know the length of a floor tile…)

At EMS, we don’t just teach children how to add and subtract, we teach them how to act and react.

In Montessori the abstract process of math is the final step of a long series of exercises.  For most students who have studied within a traditional system, numbers on the page are just that – symbols they are taught how to manipulate.  To Montessori students, those symbols represent very concrete ideas that they have physically manipulated; they fully understand what they mean, how they work, and how to apply.

Alyssa is one of our grade two students.  As part of a spelling assignment, students were asked to write sentences using the words they had been learning throughout the week.  Alyssa not only spelled her words correctly, but clearly demonstrated her comprehension of those words in the sentences that she wrote (all on her own).  Being able to spell ‘big words’ is one thing.  Understanding the meaning of those words and applying them correctly in written work (or in a conversation), is what all schools should be aiming for.