Are You Feeding Your Child's Inner Artist?

When children start pre-school, they bring art work home nearly every day and we proudly plaster it across the refrigerator.

But once they start elementary school, the flow of masterpieces slows to a trickle. Thanks to shrinking budgets, many school systems have drastically reduced art instruction. So, if your child isn't taking art in school, how can you be sure their inner artist doesn't waste away?

According to Americans for the Arts, students who participate in three hours of arts, three days a week for at least one year are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement.

Jason Dobkin and Erika Gragg, co-creators of the new children's book "Snobbles the Great: A Snooze Patch Story," (Grabkin Creatives, LLC http://www.snobbles.com/) credit their love of art as their inspiration behind the book. Snobbles is a fruit-eating snake who is ridiculed by the other snakes in the Snooze Patch where they all live.

"I was making little clay animals and Erika would place them in plants or other settings and photograph them," says Dobkin. "That's how Snobbles came to life. We wanted to create a fantastical new world for kids so we combined the normal aspects of children's books with painting, sculpture, photography, stage design, lighting, and cinematography to make a hyper-real experience."

Dobkin and Gragg hope parents will find ways to incorporate creativity into daily activities.

"If kids don't have the opportunity to be creative when they're young, it's not going to dawn on them to start thinking in new ways when they're older," says Gragg. "Put children who don't do well academically in a dance class or give them a paint brush and they connect with it. Suddenly, everything clicks. They start understanding math or English better because their brain interprets those subjects in new ways."

Better grades, problem-solving skills and confidence are very strong incentives to make sure you encourage your child's inner artist to come out and play on a very frequent basis.