At age 3, Eli gave up on art. When his mom, Sharon Guskin, would drop him off at preschool, she'd notice how he looked at the other kids' pictures of flowers and houses, and how he seemed self-conscious about his more abstract scribbles. The teachers reported, "Eli doesn't like drawing or painting."
The next year, in addition to preschool, Eli's parents signed him up at Studio Creative Play, an enrichment program in Brooklyn where imaginative play, yoga, music, and serious amounts of art are all rolled into classes for kids ages 1 to 6. At year's end, Guskin picked up his Studio Creative Play art portfolio: pages and pages of drawings with titles such as Lion Who Saves People, The Eli Mountain, and To the North Pole on My Boat. "You looked at the pictures and felt the magic that went into them," says Guskin. And they were perfectly imperfect: "It wasn't the 'make something nice for Mommy' kind of stuff."
This type of creative breakthrough—not a pre-K-er's ability to write upper- and lowercase letters—is what Studio Creative Play has become known for since its launch. "We're not achievement-oriented," says Khahtee V. Turner, who founded the program in 2004. "Our goal is to feed children's natural curiosity and encourage self-expression." In a time of shrinking school art budgets, books about how to sculpt your child's brain, French flash cards for toddlers, and out-of-control urban angst over getting into the preschool, it's little surprise that local families have started embracing an antidote: a place dedicated to the most basic stuff of childhood—play and imagination.
Turner, herself the mother of a 7-month-old named Ansel, started thinking about the program when she worked in children's art camps several years ago. "There weren't many places for kids with art and music and creative people around," says Turner, who has also worked as a film editor. "Preschools weren't always engaging. If 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' isn't interesting to teachers, kids can read that." After several months of consultations with leaders in Reggio Emilia—an Italian early-education system in which the curriculum is driven by children's creativity—Turner opened Studio Creative Play.
Housed in a light-filled century-old building in the Park Slope neighborhood, the studio's classes range from Bambini (once a week for kids 18 to 24 months with their parents or caregivers) to Venni (daily for unaccompanied 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds). Studio Creative Play is inspired by Reggio Emilia's tenets but doesn't strictly follow its structure (for example, the studio doesn't document kids' progress as intensely as a Reggio Emilia school would). Some of the teachers are trained in early-childhood education; many are also artists and musicians; all are genuinely passionate about creativity.
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