A bright yellow octopus swallows my 4-year old student’s head before making a strange, bubbling noise and flying off into the air. He joins his rag-tag team of friends for some post-snack gossip: a friendly skeleton made of Q-tips, a curious snow-man made from three round cupcake liners, and a magical green witch on a painted paper-plate, all hanging delicately from the wall in our Craft Room.
“What are we making today?” I ask to start off our thirty minute rotation here.
“An Octopus!!” the kids reply, watching wide-eyed as I continue tickling their heads with the eight paper tentacles of our example craft. Together, we count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7… yes, 8 tentacles! We’re off to a great start.
“Can I have a paper please!?” calls out one of my students, anticipating the materials she’ll need. I’m impressed, and I realize our weekly repetition of this phrase has finally stuck. Everyone else repeats after her, and gets an enthusiastic high-five for doing so!
“Here you go!” I repeat roughly eight times, handing out the yellow cardstock and demonstrating the lines we’re meant to cut along with our little scissors. Over the next twenty-odd minutes, this group of Hunny Bunnies will be as laser-focused as they can get at this age: cutting, gluing, and colouring to make this octopus their own. They’ll also inevitably be using phrases like “Help me please!” “Oh no!” “Look at this!” and “Waaahhhhhhh” as they encounter and overcome some creative challenges (cutting in a straight line is hard at this age!).
In the end, what they get to take home isn’t just a paper sea-creature to decorate the living room floor. It’s a symbol of their hard work: something concrete that represents their improving artistic (and linguistic) abilities! Every day at Casita, every student of every age group is able to create a craft from start to finish with the instructions explained to them entirely in English.
Art and Language-Learning Go Hand-in-Hand
At La Casita de Inglés, students learn two languages: English, and Art. These languages compliment each other, opening up an even greater range of self-expression that our little ones can use throughout their lives to communicate and connect. In our craft room, learning English becomes tactile, concrete, and creative; the crafts we make are an opportunity to take abstract words and concepts and turn them into something visual that young minds can easily register.
Arts-based curricula have been shown to improve young English learners’ academic performance in both their first and second languages (Spina, 2006). What’s going on under the hood in our students’ minds when they are working creatively?
In the process of making arts and crafts, students are transferring information between different meaning-making systems in the brain, which makes new vocabulary more memorable and easy to draw on across different contexts (Rinne et al., 2011). For example, the flow of learning during our octopus craft requires students to:
- Understand and produce the new language: “Octopus!”
- Use their imagination to visualize how they are going to transform a sheet of cardstock paper into this eight-tentacled floating sea-creature.
- Manipulate the cardstock paper with their hands, cutting and glueing and holding and folding until they get to the desired outcome.
- Ask their teacher and other students for help, and in the end, proudly show off what they’ve made!
In the end, students have encoded our new English vocabulary into their memory using the parts of their brains responsible for language, vision, movement, and socializing all at once! Needless to say, recruiting this kind of brain power means that Octopi will be far more memorable for these kids than it would have been had they simply been asked to reproduce vocabulary on an exam.
Exams! What a scary word, and one that can make learning English feel like roasting in a pressure-cooker for many young students. While exams may ultimately be unavoidable in the world of language-learning, arts and crafts can serve as an offset by supporting emotion-regulation skills; it can distract students from their anxiety, boost their self-esteem, and help them learn to become more active problem-solvers (Fancourt et al., 2019). Our setup in La Casita de Inglés is designed to make students feel comfortable and at home; by offering a class for them to work with their hands, we help soothe them into the environment so their confidence can flourish even more.
Working on arts and crafts also supports the development of children’s fine motor skills- in other words, anything that involves close hand-eye coordination, like cutting, drawing, and folding things. If you’ve read our previous article on embodied learning, you’ll already know that language and movement share some of the same brain networks (e.g. in the sensorimotor cortex and the cerebellum; Winter et al., 2021). As such, the cutely named “nimble hands, nimble minds” hypothesis explains that these precise hand/eye coordination skills feed into the development of broader cognitive abilities like attention and memory (Suggate & Stoeger, 2014)!
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“Did you know that most of an Octopus’ brains are in its tentacles, not its head?” I tell my class; it’s a fitting metaphor for how we, too, are learning so much while working with our hands.
The best thing about arts and crafts is that they’re easy to foster at home, too! There’s a lot you can achieve with a sheet of paper, a handful of markers, a box of lego, a paper plate, an old shoelace, and a dose of tenacity. Why not sprinkle a few English words into the mix of some creative tasks: I’m thinking birthday cards, comic strips, board games, or a treasure map with directions to the car to finally get out the door when you’ve really got to go!
At Casita, we know that with a pair of scissors and a splash of imagination, learning English can stop feeling like work, and start sticking for life.
References
Rinne, L., Gregory, E., Yarmolinskaya, J., & Hardiman, M. (2011). Why arts integration improves long‐term retention of content. Mind, Brain, and Education, 5, 89 – 96. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-228X.2011.01114.x
Spina, S. U. (2006). Worlds together… words apart: An assessment of the effectiveness of arts-based curriculum for second language learners. Journal of Latinos and Education, 5(2), 99–122. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532771xjle0502_3
Suggate, S. P., & Stoeger, H. (2014). Do nimble hands make for nimble lexicons? Fine motor skills predict knowledge of embodied vocabulary items. First Language, 34(3), 244–261. https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723714535768
Fancourt, D., Garnett, C., Spiro, N., West, R., & Müllensiefen, D. (2019). How do artistic creative activities regulate our emotions? Validation of the Emotion Regulation Strategies for Artistic Creative Activities Scale (ERS-ACA). PLOS ONE, 14(2), e0211362. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211362
Winter, R. E., Stoeger, H., & Suggate, S. P. (2021). Fine motor skills and lexical processing in children and adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 666200. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.666200