Movement Art: Engaging Children in the Artist’s Visual Chronicle of Sport to Enhance Historical Thinking

Children have always enjoyed being involved in the physical movement of games and sport as well as the visual arts. This involvement can be motivational for learning historical and artistic concepts. Historical chronology has always been difficult for children to understand. The interaction of sport with history and art serves to expand children's historical thinking by helping them to distinguish between past and present and explain change and continuity over time. Additionally, children become cognizant of visual art forms in relation to the story of sport. Artists have depicted the facets of people, events and customs of their cultures utilizing diverse styles and media of art from primitive cave drawings to electronic images. A conventional custom found in most societies throughout history was the competitive and recreative physical activity of sport. Through the conscious reproduction of sport movements, the artists have brought forth not only the beauty, physicality, rhythm, struggle and emotion of the athletes in sporting events, but also have provided, via this movement art, the chronicle of sport throughout the various eras of history.