This issue of "InSEA News" features diverse articles from authors/art educators from Brazil, Australia, the United States, Guatemala, and Scotland that discuss water projects, childhood reminiscences, comparative curricula, local artists, and community efforts to involve students in exploring a city's history. Articles in the journal…

Responding to children's natural interest in creating art, early childhood educators have historically given the visual arts an honored place in the curriculum. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, as the push for earlier academic skill development increased, art continued its centrality in programs for young children. This chapter offers teachers theory…

Children are born artists, and artistic talent emerges from the interplay of proclivity, cultural enrichment, and nurturance. Intended to demystify art for parents and teachers and to help them understand what the art experience is like for the child or adolescent, this book discusses visual art concepts in simple terms and presents art as a…

We have not learned to experience beauty as an essential, pervasive dimension of our actions. Aesthetic sensibility represents the child in us imbued with spontaneity, imagination, and unity of soul and action. This sensibility makes it possible to reevaluate the world in terms of metaphor, image, fantasy, and dreams. (PP)

A training series, designed to increase kindergarteners' conceptual and visual perception skills in dealing with texture, was evaluated. Improvement occurred in subjects' ability to describe texture and to use it in artwork, but the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts indicated that ability to form new concepts was not fostered. (SJL)

This article, first in a monthly series of six, presents a theoretical overview of artistic development in young children during the prerepresentational stage and draws implications from this for teachers on intervening in a child's artistic development through dialogues. (SJL)

This study of third graders examined the relative effects, under two conditions each, of two teaching methods: modeling of the contour drawing process and presentation of predrawn examples. Analysis of children's posttest drawings for visual information content indicated that predrawn examples were more effective than modeling as a teaching…

The author discusses children's developing conceptions of how to represent objects artistically. She compares the use of detail, line, viewpoint, and dimension in imaginative and observational drawings by concrete-operational children and cites their opinions about the accuracy of their work. Part of a series on children's art. (SJL)

In this concluding article of a six-part series on children's art, the author reviews the stages of children's development in relationship to the use of three-dimensional materials and suggests teaching methods which will help children to develop artistically. (Editor/SJL)

To have more contact with children who particularly desired her help, an itinerant art teacher set up a box in each school where students could voluntarily leave their artwork for her to comment on and return later. The week's outstanding products were displayed in the cafeteria "art gallery." (SJL)

Questions whether the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) has given adequate attention to the potential long-term and damaging effects on a child by publicly exhibiting their art produced in therapy. Ethics, confidentiality, authenticity, and censorship of client art are examined. Suggests that AATA should adopt guidelines to protect the…

Four studies tested claims that young children are inhibited in attempts to change drawings because of constraints by order in which representational elements are drawn. Found that procedural rigidity levels did not predict preschoolers' performance when asked to change their representation and that preschoolers could change rigid sub-procedures…

In western North Carolina, 24 summer camps, business leaders, and a local community arts council collaborated on a project celebrating the visual and performing arts created by campers. Campers' art in every media was displayed in Hendersonville to highlight the benefits of summer camps to the community, including their economic, educational,…

Presents an art lesson used when teaching about North American Indians to fourth- and fifth-grade students. Explains that the students learn how to make baskets using a coil-wrap technique with colored yarns and beads. Provides a step-by-step explanation of how to create the baskets. (CMK)

Describes a lesson that teaches kindergarten students how to enlarge a smaller drawing onto a bigger piece of paper. Explains that the students create their heart-shape designs using tempera paint and pastels in the larger picture. Includes a list of materials. (CMK)