The author's school is only 30 minutes from New York City, so every year when second-graders study towns and cities, the students do a project based on New York City landmarks. This year was the Statue of Liberty. The author introduced Peter Max's famous Pop art to her students, and explained that, as the art world kept changing, artists decided…

What if we hosted a banquet for famous artists and they came dressed in their own work? With this idea in mind, the author gathered materials on different artists from books, magazines, and the Internet. To simplify things somewhat, she only used artists from the mid-1800s to the present. The sixth graders made the artists' masks, placemats, and…

Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923) is that rarity: a famous, living woman artist. In trying to reinforce the idea of contemporary women in art, the author chose to introduce her sixth-graders to Schapiro's work. In this article, the author describes how her students created dancing figures which were inspired by Schapiro's series of "Rondo" dancers.

The author has always been fascinated by old photographs. As she looks at them, she wonders about the people. Who were they? What were their lives like? Where was this photo taken? A moment in time is frozen forever, for all to see. Inspired by old photographs, the author describes how her fifth-grade classes made their own "photographs" by…

The author and her colleagues had picked an "Alice in Wonderland" theme for their Open House night, and decided it might be nice to have a large sculptural figure of Alice and the Queen of Hearts made out of papier-mache. They were a big hit and the students loved making figures that were larger than some of their students. The next year, they…

The textiles of Africa are rich with possibilities for art lessons. With their unique balance of color, pattern, symmetry and repetition, they lend themselves to exciting art lessons with cultural significance. Asante cloth--or Kente cloth, as it is commonly known--is a perfect example. These rich, colorful repeat patterns from Ghana are woven in…