Kaleidoscope: How a Creative Arts Enrichment Program Prepares Children for Kindergarten

In 1990, the Settlement Music School Kaleidoscope Preschool Arts Enrichment Program, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, created a preschool program to teach music and other creative arts to three- to five-year-olds. This article describes how the program works: how music teaches language and math, how dance teaches action words and spatial concepts, how painting leads to writing letters and words. It explores ways in which preschoolers develop physical, cognitive, and social competence through the creative arts. The author describes a child's typical day at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)-accredited child care center and academic preschool, moving from homeroom to music studio to dance studio and to visual arts studio, and then back to homeroom. She explains how Kaleidoscope uses the arts to achieve early childhood learning objectives.