Early childhood education is a critical time for building foundational cognitive, social, and emotional skills that shape a child’s lifelong learning journey, positioning early educational experiences as catalysts for reflection, autonomy, creativity, and social responsibility within the preschool context. Among these, artful thinking and critical thinking stand out as transformative forces fostering creativity, reasoning, autonomy, and communication skills from a very young age, aligning with contemporary goals to cultivate thoughtful, reflective citizens from the earliest years of schooling.
Also Read: The Role of Art Education in Early Childhood Development
This article systematically explores how artful thinking techniques can develop critical thinking skills in preschool children, showcasing findings from an innovative art education program conducted by pre-service kindergarten teachers in public kindergartens, and presents detailed evidence across instructional design, teacher practice, child outcomes, and program evaluation. Drawing on comprehensive research and practical pedagogical examples, this detailed guide demonstrates how integrating global artworks and thinking routines within early childhood settings enriches young learners’ intellectual and emotional growth by making thinking visible, normalizing evidence-based justification, and supporting perspective-taking and narrative reasoning.
Artful Thinking & Critical Thinking in Early Childhood
The Significance of Artful Thinking in Early Childhood
Artful thinking transcends traditional art education by incorporating structured thinking routines that actively engage children in inquiry, interpretation, and reflection, thereby positioning art as a vehicle for metacognition and dialogic learning rather than a purely aesthetic pursuit. Rooted in the Project Zero framework developed at Harvard Graduate School of Education, artful thinking utilizes open-ended prompts such as “What do you see here?” and “What makes you say that?” to make thinking visible and cultivate flexible cognitive dispositions, emphasizing dispositions like making comparisons and connections, recognizing complexity, exploring perspectives, reasoning with evidence, questioning and investigating, and observing and describing.
This approach leverages diverse art forms—visual arts, music, movement, drama—as vehicles through which children observe closely, make connections, pose questions, and reason about their experiences in a manner that validates multiple meanings and disallows a single “correct” interpretation, thereby reducing performance anxiety and inviting sustained engagement. Contrary to viewing art as merely an aesthetic or creative outlet, artful thinking positions art as a catalyst for developing skills essential for lifelong learning—critical observation, thoughtful interpretation, and empathetic understanding—building toward culture-rich, reflective learning communities in kindergarten environments.
Critical Thinking in Preschool Years: Early Foundations
Critical thinking, defined by Facione (1990) as intentional, reflective evaluation of information and concepts, is not restricted to later schooling; rather, evidence indicates it can be nurtured effectively through appropriately designed experiences that emphasize questioning, exploration, and creativity within a collaborative context in early childhood. In modern preschool classrooms, reflective thinking is supported through dialogue, interpretation, and connecting personal experiences with creative activities—often catalyzed by art, storytelling, and dramatic representation—making reflection an embodied and social process for young learners.
In young children aged 4 to 6, critical thinking is observed as hypothesis generation, justification of opinions with perceptual evidence, and emotional contemplation rather than formal deduction, a pattern that aligns closely with visual inquiry and multimodal meaning-making in art encounters. Artworks, treated as multimodal texts, support children in discovering multiple meanings, generating symbolic representations, and reflecting on social relationships, emotions, and lived experiences; this orientation fosters reflective learning communities where teachers act as facilitators and co-researchers of children’s meaning-making.
Within this framework, artful thinking routines provide a scaffold for organizing thoughts, articulating ideas, intertwining emotion with reason, and enhancing engagement in social discourse, reinforcing that children’s capacities for critical and creative thinking are accessible and can be developed through guided practice.
Research Study: Artful Thinking Program with Preschool Children
The study described here was implemented during the 2024–2025 academic year in five public kindergartens in Rethymno, Crete, as a qualitative, evaluative multiple-case study of six instructional interventions led by 40 pre-service kindergarten teachers under academic supervision, with the supervisor acting as facilitator, mentor, and observer. Two preparatory workshops were held at the university to support pre-service teachers in understanding and internalizing the artful thinking methodology for approaching artworks with preschool children, after which the teachers conducted the interventions and compiled portfolios documenting planning, implementation, evaluation, and photographic records. [link]
Data collection comprised non-participant observation recorded in a field journal, analysis of teacher portfolios via content analysis, and a post-intervention evaluation questionnaire featuring a demographic item and eight closed items on a five-point Likert scale (plus one open-ended question), with quantitative analysis performed using frequency and percentages in Excel for clarity and reliability.
The program’s central aim was to implement and evaluate an art-based model using global artworks to enhance preschool children’s thinking skills through artful thinking routines, with research questions probing how artful thinking connects with arts learning in kindergarten, whether such a program can improve thinking skills, and how children’s critical reasoning can be supported through engagement with diverse painters’ works.
Detailed Instructional Interventions and Activities
Each instructional intervention introduced children to selected painters’ works alongside targeted thinking routines and cross-curricular links across mathematics, ICT, music, drama, physical education, and visual arts, using high-quality reproductions, digital projections, storybooks, and hands-on materials to stimulate inquiry.
Vincent van Gogh: Children explored The Starry Night and Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers using I See–I Think–I Wonder for questioning, perceive–know–care about for perspective-taking, and color/shape/line noticing for observation, integrated with math, ICT, visual arts, and natural sciences; teachers reported initial anxiety that eased as children’s enthusiasm rose with well-chosen teaching aids such as a class mascot, storybook, reproductions, and a laptop to support interest and participation.
Edgar Degas: Using The Millinery Shop, Ballet Dancers on the Stage, and Harlequin’s Dance, teachers created calm, aesthetic viewing spaces and used progressive reveals and projection to scaffold close looking; children discussed movement and nonverbal storytelling, then transitioned to making pastel figures inspired by poses and costumes, illustrating a seamless bridge from perception to expression.
Henri Matisse: Collage-based works such as The Cat and the Red Fish, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, Red Room, Boy with Butterfly Net, and The Snail supported routines including I See–I Think–I Wonder, Looking: Ten Times Two, Beginning–Middle–End, Headlines, and Perceive–Know–Care About; teacher reflections emphasized how removing pressure for “realistic” depiction unlocked children’s imaginative interpretations and affirmed that artful thinking gives children a voice.
René Magritte: Paintings like Golconda, The Voice of Space, The Return, The Son of Man, Decalcomania, The Promise, and Man in a Bowler Hat enabled fantasy warm-ups, “Truth or Fantasy?” games, and group reimagining of surreal elements; teachers reported that experience, play, and collaboration were core design principles helping children approach symbolic, subversive imagery through joyful inquiry.
Frida Kahlo: Works such as Me and My Parrots, Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser, The Wounded Deer, and Frieda and Diego Rivera supported Beginning–Middle–End, Headlines, I Used to Think–Now I Think, and Perceive–Know–Care About; teachers described careful facilitation with open-ended questions to elicit observation, justification, and emotional inquiry, leading to rich dialogue about symbolism, sadness, resilience, and companionship.
Yayoi Kusama: With Pumpkin, Dots Obsession, Infinity Dots, Mushrooms, Lemonade, Watermelon, and Flowers, children used I See–I Think–I Wonder, Beginning–Middle–End, and Headlines, integrating ICT, visual arts, mathematics, and movement; observations highlighted how dot patterns sparked analogies to bubbles and microcosms and how Think–Expand–Share deepened reflection, critique, and narrative building.
Key Findings: Cognitive and Social-Emotional Development
Evaluation data reflected substantial developmental gains across multiple domains, as reported in the questionnaire and supported by observation and portfolio evidence, reinforcing artful thinking’s effectiveness as both a cognitive and socio-emotional scaffold in early childhood.
- Critical Thinking and Cognition: 42.5% of responses indicated “moderate” change in children’s thinking level, with a further 25.0% “very” and 17.5% “extremely,” confirming meaningful improvements due to program participation, while 15.0% reported “slightly” and 0% “not at all”.
- Social-Emotional Growth: Benefits were concentrated in social-emotional development, interpersonal relationships, and personal empowerment/social responsibility, with the distribution indicating notable positive effects across collaborative learning, respect for diverse viewpoints, and SEL capacities.
- Expression and Communication: Changes in modes of expression showed 50.0% “very,” 42.5% “moderately,” and 2.5% “extremely,” indicating significant enhancement in expressive abilities, particularly in oral articulation, storytelling, and symbolic representation during art talk and making.
- Cognitive Functions: Critical thinking, observation skills, and inquiry were significantly enhanced; for example, oral language enhancement rated 52.5% “very” and 12.5% “extremely,” with only 5.0% “slightly” and 0% “not at all,” indicating strong language gains from routine-based discussions.
- Participation: Inquiry- and discovery-oriented participation clustered at 42.5% “moderately,” 35.0% “very,” and 17.5% “extremely,” showing the routines’ capacity to sustain exploratory engagement and active involvement across sessions.
- Teaching Approaches: Cooperative learning was rated 57.5% “very” and 25.0% “extremely,” while differentiated instruction peaked at 52.5% “moderately,” and play-based learning at 45.0% “very” and 47.5% “extremely,” aligning with the program’s experiential, dialogic ethos.
- Higher-Order Thinking: Use of higher-order thinking during questioning processes registered 47.5% “moderately,” 30.0% “very,” and 17.5% “extremely,” confirming frequent activation of analysis, interpretation, creativity, and justification among preschoolers when facilitated through artful thinking.
- ICT Use: ICT functioned primarily as a supportive tool for instructional intervention with 47.5% “very” and 42.5% “moderately,” but 60.0% “not at all” for using ICT as a medium for sharing children’s work, indicating an implementation gap in outward-facing digital pedagogy and family engagement.
Advantages: Teachers highlighted familiarization with global cultural heritage (97.5%), improved 21st-century skills (92.5%), improvements in oral/written/multilingual communication (92.5%), strengthened ability to pose purposeful questions (92.5%), and development of well-supported answers (82.5%), showcasing both cognitive and communicative impact.
Disadvantages: The most cited challenges were cost of materials (87.5%), difficulty explaining some artful thinking questions (67.5%), children’s feelings of frustration due to “wrong answers” (50.0%), and fatigue (47.5%), underscoring material, developmental, and affective considerations for implementation.
Pedagogical Implications and Best Practices
This study confirms that artful thinking, combined with high-quality art education in early childhood settings, promotes foundational skills central to contemporary learning, including observation, interpretation, argumentation, collaboration, and aesthetic literacy, while elevating children’s agency and reflective capacities. Educators are encouraged to emphasize open-ended questioning to sustain inquiry and reflection without prescribed “right” answers, thereby scaffolding justification and metacognition for young learners during art encounters and beyond. Playful, collaborative learning environments should be cultivated, using small-group discourse and structured routines to increase talk-time, peer explanation, and equitable participation, in line with the program’s strong cooperative learning profile.
Art selections should span diverse cultural and stylistic traditions—figurative, abstract, surrealist, performative—to elicit a range of cognitive and emotional responses and to cultivate cultural awareness and empathy. Multimodal materials and ICT tools can be used to support close looking and documentation; however, the underuse of ICT for publishing suggests opportunities to expand digital competencies to communicate learning with families and the broader community responsibly and meaningfully.
Professional development is critical for pre-service and in-service teachers to internalize routine facilitation, developmental tuning of prompts, documentation practices, and strategies for addressing sensitive imagery and emotions through dialogic frames aligned with children’s zones of proximal development. Resource allocation should be planned to mitigate material cost barriers, using low-cost and upcycled materials, community partnerships, and careful sequencing to ensure rich experiential learning without undue financial strain on classrooms or teachers.
How Art Builds Critical Thinking in Preschool
Within this research, artworks function as multimodal texts that invite observation, evidence-based reasoning, perspective-taking, and narrative construction, aligning naturally with what critical thinking looks like in the preschool years. Routines such as What Makes You Say That? normalize justification and reduce right–wrong anxiety, while Perceive–Know–Care About scaffolds empathy and social imagination by asking children to reason about viewpoints and concerns of people or subjects depicted in images.
Beginning–Middle–End provides a narrative structure for thought, helping children sequence events and meanings and connecting visual stimuli to emergent literacy and comprehension development in age-appropriate ways.
Looking: Ten Times Two stretches attention, observation stamina, and vocabulary through iterative noticing, cultivating habits of mind that support careful analysis and descriptive language growth over repeated exposures to images. Collectively, these routines formalize a classroom culture in which thinking is valued, visible, and revisitable, thereby promoting metacognitive awareness and transferable reasoning skills even at ages 4–6.
Emotional Literacy and Agency Through Art
The program’s qualitative evidence shows that art discussions and making sessions became safe spaces for affective exploration, where children linked colors, expressions, and symbols to feelings and authored personal narratives, especially during units with emotionally rich imagery such as Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits and The Wounded Deer. Teachers reported that open-ended questioning was essential for approaching complex images with sensitivity, allowing children to engage at their own developmental level and to transform initial silence or uncertainty into meaningful dialogue and shared storytelling. Such practices strengthened personal agency and interpersonal understanding, framing art not merely as a product but as a sustained conversation in which children recognized themselves as capable interpreters and creators.
Cross-Curricular Integration: Math, Science, Movement, Language, ICT
Effective preschool art education in this program integrated mathematics (patterns, counting, shapes), science (light, color mixing, materials), movement and music (dance, rhythm, gesture), drama (role play, symbolic action), and literacy (sequencing, descriptive vocabulary, headlines), making learning multidimensional and experiential. Degas’ works supported embodied learning through dance and gesture; Matisse’s cut-outs foregrounded shape, color, and pattern; Magritte’s surrealism amplified perspective shifts and hypothesis-making; and Kusama’s repetitions bridged visual patterning with mathematical thinking and group critique.
Dialogic routines drove language development, with strong evidence of oral language enhancement at “very” and “extremely,” indicating that repeated, structured talk around images contributes substantially to expressive capacity in preschoolers. ICT tools facilitated close looking through projection and magnification, retrieval of reference images, and visual support; however, the low use of ICT for outward sharing highlights a domain where teacher training could further leverage digital tools to extend learning communities responsibly.
Teacher Practices That Worked
Observed high-leverage practices included creating calm, aesthetically organized viewing environments; pacing image reveals; adhering to core routine questions; and transitioning from viewing to making so that perception led into personal expression. Open-ended questioning was pivotal for sustained dialogue, and small-group structures increased opportunities for participation, peer-to-peer explanation, and collective meaning-making while respecting diverse interpretations. Teachers’ reflective stance—listening authentically, validating multiple readings, and emphasizing the process of inquiry—was consistently associated with children’s move from surface descriptions to analogies, interpretations, and narrative synthesis.
Challenges and Limitations
Implementation challenges centered on materials cost, the developmental complexity of some routine questions, children’s occasional frustration when perceiving “wrong answers,” and fatigue during extended sessions, signaling the need for adaptation and thoughtful pacing. The study’s qualitative, context-specific design, supervisor involvement, and potential social desirability in teacher self-report limit broad generalization, prompting calls for longitudinal and comparative studies across diverse settings and instructional models. Despite these constraints, triangulation of observations, portfolios, and questionnaires strengthens confidence in the reported cognitive, linguistic, social, and emotional gains associated with the program.
Pedagogical Guide: Implementing Artful Thinking in Preschool
Based on this research, practical steps include starting with two to three core routines (I See–I Think–I Wonder; What Makes You Say That; Beginning–Middle–End) and expanding as children internalize patterns of inquiry and justification in discussions around artworks. Selecting diverse artworks—figurative, abstract, surreal—broadens the field of meaning while allowing developmental differentiation; teachers can provide sentence stems, visual prompts, and small-group rotations to sustain equitable participation.
Documentation through portfolios, transcription of child quotes, and photo sequences makes thinking visible for families and faculty, while privacy-aware ICT publishing can extend dialogue beyond the classroom, addressing the current gap in outward communication. Budget planning, community partnerships, and upcycling strategies mitigate material constraints, ensuring access to rich making experiences that reinforce reflective processes linked to viewing.
Conclusion: Artful Thinking as a Catalyst for Lifelong Learning
Integrating artful thinking into early childhood education transforms art from passive aesthetic experience into an active cognitive and socio-emotional development tool that supports observation, interpretation, reasoning, empathy, and collaborative discourse in age-appropriate ways. Systematically implemented art programs featuring global masterpieces and thinking routines equip young children to engage with complexity, articulate evidence-based interpretations, and reflect with others in supportive, dialogic communities of inquiry.
Investing in teacher training, resource provision, digital competencies, and flexible, inquiry-driven curricular design will embed artful thinking approaches within early childhood practice, expanding both the scope and depth of children’s learning opportunities. By making children’s thinking visible and encouraging imaginative engagement with art, early educators sow the seeds for lifelong curiosity, reflection, and autonomous learning, fulfilling the dual mandate of fostering cognitive growth and nurturing aesthetic and emotional literacies that endure well beyond the preschool classroom.