Habitot Children's Museum

Purpose: Serving as Centers of Community Engagement Art Reach is a yearlong, comprehensive, community-based model program, ArtReach, intended to establish an ongoing, hands-on preschool art program at a school or center based on teaching methods and activities developed at Habitot children's Museum. This grant will support the program at two schools from a state-run consortium of schools managed by Alameda County. To establish a preschool art program, the following school-based activities are undertaken: parent recruitment, teacher and parent volunteer orientation and training sessions, Family Art Nights, classroom arts instruction throughout the school year, and a year-end Preschool Art Show. Museum-based activities as part of the program include field trips to the museum and its art studio for classes at the school, independent subsidized family visits to the museum, and teacher and parent volunteer training at the museum. The two main goals of ArtReach are to provide preschool children in underserved communities with meaningful art experiences as a regular part of the curriculum and to provide preschool teachers, caregivers, and parents with the knowledge, resources, and training to embrace and build on children's experiences in the program.