The One Thing Scott Walker & I Agree Upon…up to a point.

Wisconsin educators and the governor agree on very little right now – except this: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stated in his budget speech on March 1, 2011, "I set as a goal that all Wisconsin third graders should be able to read at the 3rd grade level."

How do we work together as a state to accomplish this daunting task?

The answer to having literate 3^rd graders in Wisconsin is not just about reading instruction but about combining reading instruction with arts instruction. Schools, parents and teachers who expose children to the arts, specifically music, theater, books and poetry are teaching their children something called "phonemic awareness" -- the awareness of the sounds and meanings of speech and words.

A baby recognizes her parents' voices, a toddler tests his knowledge of language by giving one word commands, and pre-school children learn nursery rhymes, songs and play pretend using language. Children also see the symbols of the language, the letters on the printed page of story books next to the beautiful pictures and on television shows designed to teach language.
These basic activities are the roots of language awareness; the next step is combining visual and performing arts with language instruction. Physical participation with words, like singing a song with Mom, playing pretend with Dad, or reading a story with Grandma, is key to the child's making sense of the language in his world.

This is where arts education is critical. The Arts Education Partnership has collated 62 studies about arts education in all the disciplines. The total picture about early arts education is clear.

1. Dramatic play enhances reading skills especially for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. That pre-school reenactment of the story The Billy Goats Gruff is not only entertaining your child, but helping her to be more ready to read.
2. Dramatic enactment also helps writing skills by helping students to visualize and create language for a particular idea or story.
3. Arts instruction increases spatial reasoning skills, improves problem solving abilities and allows for creative thinking. This helps students apply what they have learned from a text to other activities and other disciplines like math.

Here's how it works: a child seeing a live stage production based on a book she has read will have experienced the story through sight and sound from a trusted adult, a parent, teacher or children's librarian before the production. At the production, she sees, hears and spatially understands the text; the text has come alive on the stage.
Later, after school or on the playground at recess, she embodies the characters in the play through pretending. Last, the child asks for the story to be read again, seeing repeatedly the words and symbols and pictures that readers must decode.

Providing each step of this cycle of learning is essential to teaching reading to young children. Thus it is imperative that our communities provide a rich and varied arts menu for our young children. Support for public libraries, community art centers, theater and music performance spaces, educational performance opportunities, dance instruction, public television shows designed for language instruction and music classes for little ones are crucial for literacy.
And, supporting public arenas for early arts education should be an integral part of reading education in Wisconsin.

One such place where children can experience the arts is the LuCille Tack Center for the Arts in Spencer. Programs like the stage production of the beloved children's story book Click, Clack, Moo May and participation in the Missoula Children's Theater production of Pinocchio, March 28-April 2, performances at and April 2, create literary experiences for children in central Wisconsin.

We invite you to attend or participate in a production with your little language learner or support literacy in Wisconsin. Writing to your local legislator in defense of music and arts education in the public schools, or donating what you can to support your local arts organizations will go a long way in accomplishing our shared goal of making sure every third grader can read at a third grade level.

LuCille Tack Center for the Arts, is located at 300 School Street, Spencer. Box office: 715-559-4499 web: http://www.lucilletackcenter.com/