When students feel comfortable in the learning environment and are being given authority to make their own choices about what they want to create, they can create significant artworks with different personal expressions through the form of narratives. Students feel this freedom especially when they are not in the regular school environment where learning is structured by specific learning objectives. In addition, after-school projects offer diverse and more open-ended contexts for each student to construct new meaning through free-choice learning in their daily lives. Students construct personal narratives in their works through their own sense-making. This is a process of meaning-making, information-synthesizing, and knowledge-reconstruction. In this article the author discusses after-school projects created by his 5th-grade students during their summer vacations and the teaching strategies that he used according to the framework of Roberts's (1997) personal narrative learning model. Lastly, he provides suggestions to art teachers interested in exploring art pedagogies for facilitating after-school art learning by connecting it to the students' daily lives, thus making students' art learning experiences more meaningful. (Contains 6 figures.)