Art for Students with Special Needs

Last year, I had a placement where I worked with a young teenage boy who had autism for an entire semester. We met at least once every week and in the beginning of the semester he was very shy and reserved and it was difficult to figure out his interests and things that he enjoyed doing. I met with his mother to discuss this topic and see if she had any ideas that she could suggest for me to make our meeting time more worthwhile for him. She told me that he enjoyed doing normal boy things, like played sports or going for a workout, which was totally fine with me. She said that he never really enjoyed doing arts and crafts projects because he wasn’t very good at it, so that was something I avoided until our very last meeting when I wanted to make him a collage that he could keep to remember our times together.

Our collage first started out as him just watching me and making comments about what I was doing but he quickly became quite engaged and involved in the craft. He got very creative and actually took over the entire project! He also went on to make me a card to keep thanking me and telling me how much he would miss me. While he had certainly loosened up a great deal from out first meeting, he was never the overly open child and if he hadn’t written out this card I probably would have never understood how he really felt about the friendship that we had formed. Art and this project helped him to express his true feelings, which is important for him considering he is a person who was unable to fully express his feelings in words.

Literacy in Art

There are many, many different forms of art. Some art is simply beautiful and means nothing, while others are symbolic or may even tell a story. The most amazing thing about art is to one person it can mean one thing and to another it can be interpreted entirely differently.

For some people, a painting and any piece of art can tell an entire story. It's like the phrase, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Sometime there are stories, feelings, etc that are difficult or impossible to portray in verbal or written language but can be displayed beautifully in a painting. The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" is particularly true for visual learners and I'm sure you can see why. Visual learners learn best through seeing and doing rather than through other forms of communication. For visual learners, it may be easiest an most efficient for them to display their ideas through art. We have all heard stories of famous artists who were not considered particularly intelligent, however, their real ideas and "stories" were magnificent in their pieces of art. This goes to show the different learning styles and abilities of people that should never go unnoticed.