Eisner maintains that the Arts education community needs ‘empirically grounded examples of artistic thinking related to the nature of the tasks students engage in, the material with which they work, the context’s norms and the cues the teacher provides to advance their students’ thinking’ (2000:217). This paper reflects on preliminary results of a collaborative research project between teachers and university researchers that is investigating how children develop and refine arts-making ideas and related skills in Dance and Music in a small sample of schools in New Zealand. Factors such as the place of repetition in the development of ideas, the relevance of offers, the place of verbal and non-verbal communication in arts idea generation, and group work as an accepted ritual of practice, are explored and discussed.