Teaching Art

I teach art on a volunteer basis at the Jewish Academy every other Friday to the K-1 class. You’d think by the end of the week the kids would be tired and ready for the weekend, but they are so great and are so easy to work with. So far I have had no discipline issues to deal with and every child has been happy to sit down and work on whatever I’ve brought for them to do.

For the first lesson we did color wheels, starting with primary colors. What amazed me was how exciting they found this simple exercise. One boy got the brown right on the first try and was so proud. They all were very impressed with his color wheel.

Then I passed around pictures of Color Plane and Minimalist paintings for them to look at and say how the colors and shapes were making them feel, and then they painted their own. They all came up with different results. Some wanted to add black tape, to mimic the black lines in Mondrian’s paintings, so they did that. This was a really good project to start with.

This past Friday I brought in tons of photos cut out of magazines and had them make a collage that tells a story. This was a much more complicated project than the first one, but all of the kids attacked it head-on. One little girl, a sports lover, composed a story about a basketball player coming to her house for dinner. Another showed a picture of a lady surrounded by all of her stuff (like in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings).

One first grader started an epic work about a man and woman going on a great adventure to discover new lands. She decided that her plans were too great to complete during my class, so she folded up her project, put it in her box, and announced that she would complete it during the week. Erin, the teacher, has an expression, "If you have think you are done, you have only just begun." I think that this attitude of working on something long and hard rather than just getting it done is great. I am so glad that she is willing to have these art projects last longer than just the time I am there so that the kids that want to can complete something they are proud of.