An Arts Curriculum that Promotes Social and Emotional Learning Taught by Professional Artists
Wellness by Design is an innovative and dynamic approach to teaching social emotional learning skills using visual and performing arts.
Wellness by Design is a K-8 standards-based curriculum with lessons taught by professional artists. The lessons, introduced by a licensed psychologist, incorporate specific social and emotional skills that can enhance students’ resilience and well-being. The arts content (dance, music, theater, visual arts, and literary arts) explicitly correlates and aligns those art-making skills and concepts inherent to creative processes with the five main clusters of social emotional competencies, thus providing students an opportunity to develop self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making skills (CASEL, www.casel.org).Â