Our
Mission
The Summer Fine Arts
Program is the leader of innovative children summer arts education in Tucson
for Kindergarten through the 5th grades. Celebrating its 31st
year, our program is dedicated to fostering the creative spirit in children.
It offers opportunities for children to build artistic self-expression and
enhance their ability to perform both creatively and academically in many
challenging environments. It focuses on helping students build
bridges between the arts and the other disciplines in order to foster
literacy, inquiry, and critical thinking.
Our
Philosophy
Our
philosophy is to validate the creative impulses and uniqueness of each
student. We hope to provide a bridge between the artistic experience and
the development of the whole child and thus increase their academic
achievement. We believe the arts are vital for personal and cultural
development for our community and for society as a whole.
Our Teachers
Our
teachers are outstanding and have achieved many honors and awards in their
fields. Our teachers are dedicated to providing each child with an enriching
and educational opportunity to explore and learn about the visual and fine
arts in a safe and nurturing environment. Every teacher engages the
children with unusual learning activities to increase a child’s sense of
wonder and joy with the world around them. Our classrooms are very lively,
imaginative places encouraging children to THINK about possibilities and
creating motivation for learning. We have many prominent artists come and
work directly with the children and their teachers throughout the program to
enrich our curriculum
Our
Curriculum
Our
curriculum is focused on new ways of learning with an emphasis on MULTIPLE
INTELLIGENCES as developed by Harvard professor Howard Gardner. Dr. Gardner
believes the arts can and do play a crucial role in improving a student’s
ability to learn, drawing on a range of intelligences and learning styles,
not just linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence which most school
curriculums are based. Our complete curriculum is mailed directly to all
our families before our program begins.
Our
Students
Over
71% of the students return year after year until they “graduate” from the
program in the 5th grade. Students come from all over the Tucson area and
are grouped by ages. Each age group is limited to approximately 25 students
per class. We bring each child through the “process” at their own
individual level. We have 9 teachers plus 26 assistants and our
teacher/student ratio is 1:4.
Our
Results
What
have we found? Art works!!!! Art education improves academic performance.
There is a direct connection between exploration, creativity, and academic
achievement.
Although the real impact of the arts as an experience cannot entirely be
measured, data indicates that the activities offered at the Summer Fine Arts
Program support both the creative and intellectual development for children.
