The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE) program on elementary special education students' academic achievement (reading and math) and social-emotional learning. EASE was a 5-year program providing professional development and instruction in the arts in 10 New York City special education…

Latin American customs and colors play an important role as second graders are introduced to multicultural experiences through food, music, dance, art, and craft. In this article, the author describes a printing project inspired by Guatemalan weavings and amate bark paintings. (Contains 2 online resources.)

The author's second-grade students were completing a unit in their classroom on fairy tales. The author was asked to come up with a coinciding project to emphasize the imaginative and magical aura of fairy tales. A few years ago, the author attended the Philadelphia Flower Show where the theme was Ireland. Among the outstanding landscape exhibits…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of two innovative, art-and-literature-based approaches to teaching writing (Picturing Writing: Fostering Literacy Through Art and Image-Making Within The Writing Process) on elementary school students' writing, visual literacy, and reading skills. RMC Research Corporation of Portsmouth, New…

Virginia Lee Burton was one of the first author-artists to fully integrate text with images on the printed page, captivating generations of children. She was the founder of the Folly Cove Designers, which is an artist collective known for block printed textiles and design, an artist and a writer, entwining the visual image and written word into a…

Creating clay animals and their habitats with second-grade students has long been one of the author's favorite classroom activities. Students love working with clay and they also enjoy drawing animal homes. In this article, the author describes how the students created a diorama instead of drawing their clay animal's habitat. This gave students…

In this article, the author describes a lesson he created for his second-grade classes which was inspired by the children's book, "Why is Blue Dog Blue?", by George Rodrigue. In this lesson, the students make associations between places, food and events to determine the color of their dogs. (Contains 3 resources.)

Beverage take-out trays are funky in their form and function. In this article, the author describes how to make googly eye masks out of discarded take-out trays and other common recycled or discarded materials. (Contains 1 online resource.)

Throughout the school year I invited children in a Grade Two/Three learning strategies classroom to participate in a visual narrative inquiry. The intention was to explore children's knowledge of community in artful ways; the children photographed and wrote in what was often an iterative process, where writing/talking and photographing…

The wonderful book, "How Are You Peeling? Foods with Moods" by Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers inspired a lesson on feelings and expressions for this author's second-grade students. Many students at her school have difficult lives and lots of emotional baggage, resulting in behavioral problems at school. Using the example of Fauvist portraits by…

As an art teacher, it's easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of objectives, lesson plans, grading, paperwork, setup, art shows and getting "that project" done within a certain time frame. Sometimes art teachers can miss out on a teachable moment not just for the students, but for themselves, as well. The author came upon…

Creating a self-portrait of having fun "riding a wave" is a very enlightening and engaging experience for students of all ages, but the author's second-graders had an especially wonderful time with this art experience. To begin the unit of study, the author and her students looked at self-portraits created by Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt,…

In conjunction with her school's interest in becoming more "green," this author designed an art project using inexpensive, sturdy, reusable grocery bags. In this article, she describes the different design concepts and art media used by each grade in decorating these bags. (Contains 1 online resource.)

The Cartoneras projects aim to promote the celebration of language, culture, and creativity through a collaboration between top literary minds and cardboard collectors in Buenos Aires and Lima. They produce and publish beautiful books with hand-painted cardboard covers that speak of the wonderful literature inside. Inspired by those projects, the…

The author was originally inspired by "The Exquisite Snake" exhibit she saw at a local museum. Two hundred contemporary artists contributed to this exhibit, which was an adaptation of the old parlor game called "The Exquisite Corpse" that Surrealist artists used to play in the late 1920s and '30s. The author just loved this idea and decided to…