I run the room like a children's museum with lots of objects to touch and combine, blocks, touching tables, tubs filled with oatmeal and red beans and rice, microscope and binoculars. I want the children to experience an aesthetic moment. I'm not interested in making little artists. What I want to create is an atmosphere that encourages tolerance of different artistic expressions and promotes experiences of beauty by looking and doing....more

Art Rules

How am I graded in Art?

Art Talk Handout (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to view)

Course Descriptions -1-5

REVIEW OF ART CLASSES March 2008-May 2008

First Grade – The class just finished working on a crayon resist drawing of trees. They were brought outside to draw a large tree by Middle School and were told to really look at the tree before them. It wasn’t brown and it didn’t have a ball on top. It was stressed to the students to draw the horizon line so the grass came up to the horizon line and the sky came down to the line. This was an introduction to the visual element of space using foreground, middle- ground and background.
The class worked with clay and learned to make pinched pots and coiled pots. They worked on free form sculptures and were encouraged to experiment with pulling and adding clay for details. They also worked on warm up drawings and were told that drawing was a skill that needed lots of practice. The students saw videos on Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Second Grade – The class just finished working on a crayon resist drawing of trees. They were brought outside to draw a large tree by Middle School and were told to really look at the tree before them. It wasn’t brown and it didn’t have a ball on top. Also, they drew horizon lines that gave the drawings a sense of depth. Other projects involved drawing, working with the six visual elements and daily warm up exercises. The students saw videos on Da Vinci and Michelangelo.
The class worked with clay and learned to make pinched pots and coiled pots. They worked on free form sculptures and were encouraged to experiment with pulling and adding clay for details.

Fourth Grade - This active and enthusiastic class was a joy to work with. Each student expressed a positive attitude to all of the projects and created solutions when problems arose. The children developed high relief and free standing sculptures using papier mache. These sculptures were expressions of each child’s unique personality and it was wonderful to watch the development of ideas.
The students began the quarter with graphite pencils and used values to create the illusion of three dimensions, such as, cubes and spheres on flat paper. They worked in class on weekly homework assignments based on the six visual elements of line, shape/form, values, texture, space and color. The class learned to draw the human portrait in scale and proportion. They created a warm up folder for drawing exercises that taught the children drawing skills through repetitive drawings that became more complicated as we progressed through the quarter.

Fifth Grade – This class helped design some props for the Lower School play by making action painting marks on large sheets of cardboard. They also created plaster masks and painted them with acrylic paint. The students helped design a large drawing in the VPAC multi-use area for Grandparents Day using pipe cleaners and paper-folded pinwheels to create a giant portrait. Finally, the class developed acrylic paintings on canvas based on fine art reproductions.