DESIGN, APPLICATION, AND EVALUATION OF A PROGRAM IN ART- EDUCATION FOR CHILDREN WITH SPECIAL NEEDS. Nisiotou Julia, Lecturer, Special Education Department, University of Thessaly, Greece (nisiotou@uth.gr) Arapaki Xenia, Assistant Professor, Department of Pre-School Education, University of Thessaly, Greece (parap@uth.gr) Ι. INTRODUCTION It is generally accepted that systematic art education is important to the cognitive development of typically developed preschoolers, assisting children to comprehend themselves and the world surrounding them (Smith 1982; Wright, 1991). In our project we designed and applied a composite art-educational pilot program, designed for older children with physical disability and mental retardation. It is known that a child’s full development involves motor, intellectual, linguistic, and social development (Karapetsas, 1988). Those areas are not distinct; instead, their interdependence and parallel maturation define the child’s progress towards school readiness and social integration. Motor skills mature gradually. Initially children obtain largely reflexive movement patterns; later on they acquire a finer motility that allows them to perform highly skilled voluntary movements with their hands, such as writing and drawing (Fernandez-Alvarez & Aicardi, 2001). Cerebral palsy is the most common cause of physical disability in childhood, affecting two or three out of 1000 newborns (Stanley, Blair, Alberman, 2001). Cerebral palsy describes a group of permanent disorders of movement and posture, resulting from a permanent, non- progressive lesion of the immature brain. The second most common cause of physical disability is post-traumatic brain damage (Barlow, Thomson, Johnson, Minns, 2005). Motor dysfunction reflects the abnormal development or damage of the motor centers of the cerebral cortex, either prenatally, at birth or postnatally. Palsy means paralysis, but the term encompasses also uncontrolled muscle movements caused by abnormal cerebral function. (Amiel- Tison, 2004). Therefore, CP is not a specific diagnosis, but a description of a broad group of well defined neurological and physical problems. The brain damage that causes CP may also be the reason for a large number of serious