Literacy skills and building a strong cultural and religious self-identity are critical for early learners’ cognitive development and successful socialization. The integration of arts into early learning curricula can support the acquisition of diverse literacy competencies, such as print awareness and vocabulary development while being aligned with Christian values. It is possible to build a positive community through the use of storytelling with dramatic elements.
Teaching Christian values in an explicit manner is not appropriate in multicultural classrooms, so storytelling activities could support them indirectly and through the use of texts that would exemplify the Christian understandings of the art of communication and reconciliation. With the help of such texts, storytelling activities with puppets or picture clues would support literacy competencies and promote mutual tolerance in students, thus reducing the risks of conflicts, peer bullying, and other barriers to a healthy climate in the classroom.
Arts-integrated literacy activities can also promote the Christian notions of forgiveness and mutual respect while fostering media literacy and narrative skills. One way to achieve this purpose is to play on modern children’s being “digital natives.” The strategy might involve strengthening their media literacy even more through exposure to multimedia materials that incorporate Christian values, such as thankfulness, compassion, and justice.
Encouraging children to watch a video or a cartoon with a moral message, for instance, the power of forgiveness and acceptance, and asking them to formulate takeaways and engage in short drama activities to apply their understandings of these values to real-life scenarios would support the emergence of a more positive classroom community. According to Massey, social dramatic play activities serve as a window into developing learners’ fears and dreams. Thus, aside from supporting a Christian culture, such activities could shed light on children’s degree of acceptance of values that are central to it.