Arts-Based Activities and Stories Convey Children’s Learning Experiences

Arts-based approaches can enhance understanding among all children in the group as well as the educators and can further develop children’s thinking while making learning more child-centered. Incorporating arts-based tasks with stories is both enjoyable and effective for all children. In different arts-based and holistic learning processes, stories can be used in several phases and several purposes. In this chapter, we present a holistic learning intervention, where stories are told to children to visualize the learning contents and to support memorizing and connecting them to children’s prior experiences. In the intervention to a historic house museum environment, children also create their own stories for many purposes: to reflect and convey their learning experiences and to create ideas for arts-based products. The intervention described in the chapter is implemented with a group of Finnish preschoolers and the aim is to highlight how stories could be used effectively for learning different content areas and supporting the development of different skills. In the intervention, stories are used as an arts-based activity and in connection to making a craft. The analysis of this intervention shows how the stories created by the children contain information of the learning content, children’s everyday life and experiences arisen during the visit to the museum environment.