VIDEO: Wolf Trap's Early Learning Through the Arts Program Enhances Math Skills

"By embodying a concept . . . and putting it through your body in a multi-sensory way, you're going to reach a lot of different kinds of learners," Jennifer Cooper, director of the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts, explains to the Washington Post.

Cooper is talking about the increasing positive results achieved in early childhood education with arts integration. Not having separate art classes, which is valuable in and of itself, but incorporating the arts into traditional subjects, especially math. Cooper finds that lessons where children get to move and play reach a lot of children who struggle with traditional book lessons.

In Fairfax County, Virginia's Westlawn Elementary School, drama teacher Melissa Richardson has her kids using big, booming "rhino voices" as they chant "Giant steps, giant steps, big and bold!," while walking across the room.

Then they turn into delicate lady bugs, leaping kangaroos and tiny frogs, all making their way to an imaginary watering hole.

Their playtime is actually a serious math lesson about big and small and non-standard measurements. With smaller animals requiring a greater number of steps to reach the goal, some students confuse the concepts of bigger and smaller. Physical participation helps clarify the meanings.

"Visually they need to see that," says kindergarten teacher Carol Hunt. "That concept is very difficult. The numbers are big but the measurements are small . . . it makes so much more sense when they act it out."

Meanwhile, middle-school students in Arlington have built sculptures to learn about exponents and students have used art to express their thoughts and opinions about police brutality and racial equality. Educators and artists who are proponents of the method say it reaches students who might not otherwise absorb traditional classroom methods.

A division of the Wolf Trap Foundation For The Performing Arts, the Institute for Early Learning pairs art teachers with early-childhood educators and also provides professional development to teachers.

After following students in 18 schools, 10 of which where Wolf Trap Institute art teachers helped classroom teachers generate math lessons, researchers found that pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students in classes taught by Wolf Trap-trained teachers gained about 1.3 months of math learning in the first year over their peers who were taught by traditional methods. By the second year, they were 1.7 months ahead.

Though arts-integration lessons can take far more time to plan and it can be challenging to figure out how to use drama to teach a math concept, there has been a statistical payoff.

Another advantage, Hunt explains, is that the students never get bored when they are involved in the arts-integration lessons, even if they do get "wiggly."

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