During a recent summer, the author participated in a Hands Across the Water Teacher Exchange Program to New Zealand. This experience gave her the opportunity to see how people in a different country live on a day-to-day basis. For her, one of the more interesting aspects of New Zealand was its indigenous culture, the Maori. In this activity, the…

This article presents a pilot interdisciplinary project for middle-school students including visual literacy, studio art, English-language literacy, geology and the study of indigenous groups. The location of the pilot was in the upper Midwest, along the Mississippi river bluffs of St. Paul, Minnesota. English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) students…

This activity features artwork by "Grandma Moses" in which children will learn the picture plane in terms of foreground, middle ground, and background. The teacher also introduces the children to Eric Carle's colorful collaged images in his books. Using the two artists' methods, children experimented and invented new techniques and colors. As the…

The focus of "Endangered Species: Real Life in Two Dimensions" is to create awareness about a critical environmental issue. There is a special urgency to this project because large numbers of animal species are currently endangered or on the brink of extinction. In addition to being enlightened about this important topic through research, students…

Painting on silk has a magic all its own. Versions of painting on silk can be found throughout the world from Japan and Europe to the United States. Themes for the paintings can be most any type of design or imagery. Applying the liquid dyes is exciting, as the vivid liquid colors flow and blend into the fabric. The process captures students'…

Art is a good place to learn about our multicultural planet, and African masks are prized throughout the world as powerfully expressive artistic images. Unfortunately, multicultural education, especially for young children, can perpetuate stereotypes. Masks taken out of context lose their meaning and the term "African masks" suggests that there is…

The author was fortunate enough to teach in the children's program at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado. Anderson Ranch is a magical place where artists young and old come to expand their creative spirits. The children's art program spans a wide range of media for children aged six through seventeen. There are classes to explore…

Art teachers often get stuck teaching students about "classical" artists who lived over 500 years ago. As art enthusiasts, teachers may be very interested in their importance, but children might be wondering why they have to learn about yet another dead artist. In this article, the author describes how her eighth-grade art students created their…

A title, a cover, and pages with "substance" bound together--this is what the author's eighth-grade students decided were the essential elements of a book. There could be more, but no less. In art, one does judge a book by its cover. In this article, the author describes how her students created their books. (Contains 1 online resource.)

Every year, the author's eighth-graders do some projects on color mixing and color schemes. In this article, the author gives a twist to the basic color wheel. Using rough-draft paper the same size as the paper they would eventually work on, students were to figure out a way to divide it into six spaces. They were not limited to basic rectangles,…

Vocabulary can become tedious and a chore if it is approached as such. By making art terms and vocabulary meaningful, students will remember and use them for years to come. In this article, the author describes two vocabulary review projects that work wonderfully and create great works of art: (1) cursive creature rubbings; and (2) bubbling bodies…

When the author asks her students to illustrate different types of weather, invariably their paintings look like nonobjective artwork: Winter often becomes one snowman with hundreds of asterisk snowflakes scattered throughout the picture. Spring? A rainbow with smiley-faced suns. So, in what direction could the author lead her students that would…

This article describes a project that was inspired by the Chinese Festival of Lanterns. In this project, students had the opportunity and challenge of using a variety of media to represent a range of values to create form from shape. The lanterns proved to be an interesting subject for the drawings, as well as a way to increase students' knowledge…

It is no secret that America is overweight. A record number of children are obese and are showing signs of adult diseases such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. Fortunately, people are recognizing this and beginning to do something about it: (1) restaurants and markets are offering healthier options; (2) menus are starting to list…

Telling art students to do anything they want can be dangerous. It's not something teachers often do, but this is a project where anything goes. In this article, the author describes how her students created a Mardi Gras type mask, then incorporated it into a mixed-media composition.