Since first graders at Geneva School in Winter Park, Florida have a unit based on the book "Caps for Sale" by Esphyr Slobodkina, the author, an art teacher at the school, began a tradition of painting hats. In this article, the author describes how the students decorated their hats. (Contains 1 resource and 1 online resource.)

Orland is a small agricultural town in Northern California. The community has been deluged with fundraisers and requests for money. The author knew there must be a way to self-fund. She took a closer look at what made some of their community artists successful, and she looked at what the public bought. Her challenge was to put together a project…

The author had just begun Ann Johnson's "Friendship Fence" lesson from the February 2007 issue of "SchoolArts" with her third graders. In this lesson, students created self-portraits on individual fence pickets that were then combined to make a fence. In this article, the author describes how this idea was applied to the wall of P.S. 59 Community…

With standardized English Language Arts exams on the horizon, the author thought a game of Antonyms would provide not only a quick language arts activity for her sixth graders, but also a nice segue to an art lesson in contrast. In this article, she describes a project, a simple saucer on a pedestal base, which required students to demonstrate…

Tiny metal objects, some representational, showing body parts or saints; others abstract or symbolic, are powerful items in spite of their diminutive size. These are amulets, milagros, and ex-votos and they represent a pathway to the supernatural for peoples all over the globe. Part of folk and traditional religious practices, amulets are used to…

In this article, the author describes an activity that integrates world maps into self-portraits. Students received maps and used the beautiful geographic linear designs as a basis for their self-portrait. They began by drawing the shape of their head. Some students elected to add details to their self-portrait and to the background that…

The title of this article has been taken directly from Florence M. Hart's 1957 book "What Shall We Do in Art?" It echoes a question that has been faced by legions of Ontario teachers since the creation of grammar schools in the mid-nineteenth century. While it is true that, by their very definition, provincial subject guidelines have always been…

Artists are constantly in a state of selecting. Selecting--to shape, to clarify, to discover, to make visible. A continuous flow of decisions must be made about inclusion and exclusion rendered simply as what to introduce, what to keep, and what to omit. Descriptively capturing what one wants to say requires an attentive and refined focus. The…

This article begins with a synopsis of the film "Edward Burtynsky: Manufactured Landscapes", directed by Jennifer Baichwal. While the author can relate to the statements made in this synopsis, her experience and understanding of this 90-minute journey is much more intense and complex. In this essay, she attempts to dissect and examine her…

The debate over copying in the art classroom is a longstanding and contentious one. In the past, the discussion has been erroneously characterized as a two-sided argument between those who view copying as the vilest of crimes to be perpetrated in an art classroom and those who see in it a useful and even essential tool for learning. In the last…

The benefits of drawing for children are wide-ranging but are likely to be mediated by the art curriculum and other governmental guidance to teachers relevant to drawing/art. Furthermore, such statutory regulations vary between cultures, and therefore curricula represent an important influence on the cultural differences found in children's…

Many images of the "artist" or "designer" pervade the media and popular consciousness. Contemporary images of the artist and creativity that focus solely on the individual offer a very narrow depiction of the varying ways creativity occurs for artists and designers. These images do not capture the variety of creative processes and myriad ways…

This article presents techniques and theories of generative drawing as a means for developing complex content in architecture design studios. Appending the word "generative" to drawing adds specificity to the most common representation tool and clarifies that such drawings are not singularly about communication or documentation but are also…

This article assembles some ideas on equality and learning in relation to the notions of truth and emancipation. It considers learning as a political act, as defined by Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou, rather than, for example, an incremental process of psychological or sociological development. Practical exemplifications will be taken from…

Despite a more prominent role of arts education in the school curriculum, artistic creativity does not occur to a great extent in primary school practice. More opportunities for teachers to strengthen their know-how in the field of artistic creativity can therefore be considered important. Arts education projects focus on pupils' development of…