It is easy to see the capacity of art to educate when using A Kid at Art activity packs. For as much fun as children have with them, parents are thrilled by their educational value. The projects were developed from the Great Artists curriculum of Learning Lane, a school dedicated to enriching early childhood development. Learning Lane was started by Jaymee Soni in 1999. Jaymee earned her Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, graduating with honors. She later earned her Masters Degree from UC Davis. Upon becoming a mother, she was inspired to use her education to give her children and others the best start possible. She spent years researching activities to enrich child development. Combining her education and research, she established Learning Lane, with art, play and music curriculums geared towards children ages 6 months - 8 years old.

The art program at Learning Lane quickly became a favorite of students and their parents. Building on the very popular "Great Artists" curriculum used at Learning Lane, we have developed A Kid at Art activity packs that you can do in your own home. Each kit is based on a famous artist and contains a full color booklet (filled with fun information and discussion questions about the artwork), as well as all the materials necessary for your child to create his or her very own masterpiece. We currently have 3 projects available: Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Cezanne. More are coming soon, including Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. You'll be amazed at how effective A Kid at Art activity packs are at making learning fun.

A Kid at Art activity packs are designed for children ages 3 - 12. Parents have been impressed by how well these kits work across this range of ages. For younger children, the kits are the perfect interactive learning tools for parents to use to teach colors, shapes, textures, and math concepts (including patterns, size, etc.), in a fun way. The kits are a wonderful way to provide art education for older children, who are able to delve into some of the deeper discussion questions with parents. Of course, all children and parents just love the fact that they are plain fun to do!!! Read more comments from other parents ...

So order your A Kid at Art activity packs today and use these fun adventures in learning to unlock your child's full potential! Click here to get started on placing your order.

For more information, please contact us at questions@akidatart.com or call our Customer Service number toll free at 1-916-435-9737.

Read more about the link between the arts and academic success:

The following information is presented in Highlights from Key National Research on Arts Education,

Active involvement in the arts is linked to:

* Better academic performance

A co-relationship between high involvement in the arts and better academic scores was found among all students and remained consistent when the students studied were selected only from the lowest socioeconomic quartile. Socioeconomic status (SES) takes into account parental income and education levels and has long been known to be the most significant predictor of academic performance. High SES students would be expected to have both greater involvement in the arts and better academic performance making the relationship seen here between the two not very significant. However, by comparing low SES students with other low SES students, the relationship between high arts involvement and better academic performance could be tested without SES affecting the results. In the low SES group, significant differences were found between the academic achievement of high arts-involved students and low arts-involved students as measured by standardized tests and reading proficiency measures. For instance, 30.9 percent of 12th grade, low SES, high arts-involved students scored in the top half on the standardized tests which combined math and verbal achievement. Only 23.4 percent of their low arts-involved peers (12th grade, low SES) did so. For achievement in high levels of reading proficiency the percentages are 37.9 percent for the high arts-involved students (12th grade, low SES) and 30.4 percent for the low arts involved (12th grade, low SES).

source: Champions of Change, 1999, p. 8

Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California at Los Angeles

study: Involvement in the Arts and Human Development: General Involvement and Intensive Involvement in Music and Theater Arts

* Improved creative thinking skills

More students who had received high levels of arts instruction earned high scores on measures of creative thinking than students with the lowest levels of arts instruction. Creative thinking includes various aspects of problem solving: how many ideas a student has in response to a problem, how original those ideas are, how detailed the ideas are, and the student's ability to keep her mind open long enough for innovative ideas to surface. The results were found to be, "more firmly tied to rich arts provision than to high economic status."

source: Champions of Change, 1999

p.38, p.39, Figure 1

Teachers College/Columbia University

study: Learning In and Through the Arts: Curriculum Implications

* Better math performance

Elementary students who attended schools in which the arts were integrated with classroom curriculum outperformed their peers in math who did not have an arts-integrated curriculum. In 1998, more than 60 percent of the students attending schools integrated with the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education (CAPE) performed at or above grade level on the math portion of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills while the remainder of Chicago Public School students averaged just over 40 percent. Those same numbers in 1992, before the CAPE program began were 40 percent in the pre-CAPE schools and 28 percent district-wide.

source: Champions of Change, 1999

p. 54-55, Figure 4

Imagination Project at University of California

Graduate School of Education & Information Studies

study: Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education Summary Evaluation

* Better reading performance

6th grade students who attended schools in which the arts were integrated with classroom curriculum outperformed their peers in reading who did not have an arts-integrated curriculum. In 1998, the difference in the Iowa Basic Skills Test for 6th grade reading favoring 19 schools integrated with the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education (CAPE) was 14 percentage points above 29 other Chicago public schools matched to the CAPE schools in terms of family income, neighborhood and academic performance. In 1992, before CAPE was initiated, the difference between those schools had been 8 percentage points.

source: Champions of Change, 1999

p. 55, Figure 5

Imagination Project at University of California

Graduate School of Education & Information Studies

study: Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education Summary Evaluation

* Improved cognitive development

The arts provide a "cognitive use of the emotions. In this domain it is judgment rather than rule that prevails"(Israel Scheffler, 1977). Ten general lessons the arts teach children: to make good judgments about qualitative relationships that problems can have more than one solution to celebrate multiple perspectives that in complex forms of problem solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. that small differences can have large effects to think through and within a material. constructive ways to say what cannot be said that the arts offer experience we can have from no other source that the arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

source: Learning and the Arts: Crossing Boundaries, 2000, p. 14

article: Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

Professor of Education Elliot Eisner

Stanford University

* A greater ability to use complex reasoning

Students involved in after-school activities at arts organizations showed greater use of complex language than their peers in activities through community-service or sports organizations. Linguistic anthropologists found that "the influences of participation in the arts on language show up in the dramatic increase in syntactic complexity, hypothetical reasoning, and questioning approaches taken up by young people within four-to-six weeks of their entry into the arts organization." "Generalized patterns emerged among youth participating in after-school arts groups: a five-fold increase in use of if-then statements, scenario building followed by what-if questions, and how-about prompts, more than a two-fold increase in use of mental state verbs (consider, understand, etc.), a doubling in the number of modal verbs (could, might, etc.)"

source: Champions of Change, 1999, p.27

Stanford University and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

study: Imaginative Actuality: Learning in the Arts During Nonschool Hours

* Success in the new Economy of Ideas

The arts develop skills and habits of mind that are important for workers in the new "Economy of Ideas" (Alan Greenspan). The SCANS 2000 Report links arts education with economic realities, asserting that young people who learn the rigors of planning and production in the arts will be valuable employees in the idea-driven workplace of the future." (* The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) was established in 1990 by the Secretary of Labor with the goal of encouraging a high-performance economy characterized by high-skill, high-wage employment. It defined critical skills that employees need in order to succeed in the workforce and, indeed, in life. In addition to basic literacy and computation skills which workers must know how to apply, they need the ability to work on teams, solve complex problems in systems, understand and use technology.)

source: Champions of Change, p.32

Stanford University and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

study: Imaginative Actuality: Learning in the Arts During Nonschool Hours