An inspiring and comprehensive guide to art education. In this accessibly written guide for classroom and art teachers as well as parents, Nancy Beal shows how to release children's marvelous gifts of expression. Beal believes that children must first of all be comfortable with their materials. She focuses on six basic media: collage, drawing, painting, clay, printmaking, and construction. She gives practical consideration to all facets of a teacher's responsibility: how each material should be introduced; what supplies are best; how a classroom may be set up to support children's explorations; and how teachers may ask open-ed questions to stimulate personal and meaningful expression. Beal also discusses how to integrate art into social studies and how to make museum visits productive and fun. Each chapter includes a section specifically for parents on helping their children create art at home. Beal has taught art to children for twenty-five years and is able to draw on a wealth of examples from her classroom.The Art of Teaching Art to Childrenis extensively illustrated with her students' art, visual proof of her gifts as an educator and art enthusiast. Nancy Bealhas taught art to children for twenty-five years at the Village Community School in New York City in addition to working on her own paintings. She lives with her family in Manhattan. In this accessibly written guide for classroom and art teachers as well as parents, Nancy Beal shows how to release children's marvelous gifts of expression. Beal believes that children must first of all be comfortable with their materials. She focuses on six basic media: collage, drawing, painting, clay, printmaking, and construction. She gives practical consideration to all facets of a teacher's responsibility: how each material should be introduced; what supplies are best; how a classroom may be set up to support children's explorations; and how teachers may encourage them to expand and challenge their imaginations. Beal also discusses how to integrate art into social studies and how to make museum visits productive and fun. Each chapter includes a section specifically for parents, on helping their children create art at home. Beal has taught art to children for twenty-five years and is able to draw on a wealth of examples from her classroom. Her guide is extensively illustrated with her students' art, visual proof of her gifts as an educator and art enthusiast. "The Art of Teaching Art to Childrenis exactlyright. Nancy Beal unfolds the magic , the practical, and a clear sense of children as she describes materials, motivations, and conservations in her Village Community School art room. This honest and thoughtful book should become a classic for all parents and teachers who cherish art in the lives of children."--Joy L. Moser, Teachers College, Columbia University "Nancy Beal's work is grounded in her having thoughtfully reflected on years of teaching experience with young children. This book will become a standard for any elementary art teacher."--Elizabeth Larkin, Assistant Professor of Education, University of South Florida "Full of practical, easy-to-follow advice . . . Art teachers will find [this] an invaluable handbook . . . [Beal] shows what children can do when they have the support of a caring adult--an adult who respects children's ideas and honors their creativity. Anyone who works with children, anyone who lives with children, should read this lovely and thoughtful book."--Peggy Kaye, author ofGames for Writing "Here is a book that will carry children from experimental beginnings as artists to full-fledged, deep expressive competency in art. Beal's knowledge of developmental growth is matched by her inspired motivational methods for teaching skills. Above all, she never loses sight of each child

Chapter One

THE BASIC APPROACH

"Nobody can ever tell you that you are doing something wrong in art."

--Josh Correa, age ten

My philosophy of teaching art can be stated simply. I think primarily in terms of art materials. I teach long-term familiarity with these materials so that the children can master them and use them to express their own life experiences. My goal is to have the children feel so comfortable and confident with these materials that they are willing to use them to speak about their innermost thoughts and feelings. I see the materials being as much the teacher as I am.

I work with children from ages five to ten. My art room is on an upper floor of the school building. It features a number of tables and shelves, a drying rack, a sink, and several bulletin boards. I work in a private school setting with about a dozen children at a time. I know this is not like a public school, but certain aspects of my experience are readily transferable to larger groups and to children who do art at home with their parents.

In the art room, I strive to create a working environment, an accepting atmosphere in which the children can feel safe, comfortable, and emotionally secure. I want their art experience to be exploratory, to be unthreatening and fun. Some of the kids are only four years old when they arrive. They have to walk up several flights to reach the art room. It's a whole new space for them. They have to learn to trust it.

I try to set the stage for such trust on the first day. I welcome the children warmly and introduce the room to them. In a sense, I begin by "teaching" the room. I tell them, "Everything in this room belongs to the children in this school." I say, "You can get your glue there." "That's called a sink room, where you can get your water." "Your teacher will come back to get you." The basic idea is to make them feel comfortable about moving about in the space. I want to make sure they are not overwhelmed by their experience, that they will find success and pleasure here. I have observed that, given the opportunity, most children will plunge into art with confidence and joy. I want them to retain that wonderful spontaneity.

My program covers six basic art areas: collage, painting, clay, drawing, printmaking, and construction. For each of these, I order materials that are satisfying to the eye and stimulating to the touch. I start with an open-ended exploration of the materials with all the age groups. I believe that this exploration in the beginning is much more important than seeking any specific results.

Some teachers may feel terribly burdened by thinking about how they want things to look and by trying to march the kids step-by-step toward that end. I try doing just the opposite. I'm more interested in the process itself and in having the child connect with it in a personal way. By the time the children are seven or eight, they are becoming skilled in handling the materials, and this helps them to express themselves powerfully.

For each age group, I touch base with all six art areas. In the beginning of the year, I introduce collage, paint, clay, and pencil drawing. Later, I add printing and construction. Often I will begin with two-dimensional work, such as collage and painting, since the walls of our school building are bare in the fall and this is also an opportunity for the art department to adorn those walls. But some years I work with clay in the beginning. I usually don't do the same thing with every class at the same time. (There are practical reasons for this. If you do clay with every class, there will not be enough room on the shelves for the clay to dry before being fired.)

Note: I'm concerned about protecting the children's clothing while they work. I tell the kids they cannot enter the art room unless they have their sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Although some teachers favor floppy old shirts as a form of protection, I think they get in the way. Instead I prefer the smocks made of plastic with Velcro fasteners. These are easy to put on and take off; the kids can do it themselves.

As a rule, I keep each art material separate, so that it can be clearly understood. I believe that a clarity of presentation frees the children to work creatively. Because the human figure is such an important part of the narrative of life, I give special attention to drawing, painting, and modeling the figure. (I also include a lot of social studies art that relates to the school curriculum.)

I see the children once a week. The school year covers ten months, or forty sessions. Dividing these sessions into the six basic areas for each class means, for example, that each class can do painting six or seven times during the year. I have a general sense of what materials I will offer and in what sequence I will offer them. It depends on my reading of the kids' responses. My antennae go out. When I feel the children have really had it with one material and are ready to move on, I head in a new direction. After four, five, or six weeks of painting or collage, they may be ready for something more three-dimensional. When the kids walk into the art room and see certain materials set out and say, "Oh, no. Not this again," it's a clear clue to me that we've got to move on. A certain flexibility in planning is always necessary. I keep a record of which child does what as a way of monitoring his or her growth. I also keep a record of the activities of each class, so that later in the year the children can be directed toward the materials they haven't yet used.

I try to extend each material as long as possible, however, to give the kids a chance to truly explore it in depth. Their investigations may require many weeks, months, and even years. This approach produces a rich, personal art, an expression of something the children have explored deeply and to which they have applied their newly acquired skills.

I encourage and respect each child's way of working and let each one work at his or her own pace. (Children are always comfortable at their own level.) I want to make sure that the things they do in art don't overwhelm them, that the children, with their differing abilities, can find success in whatever they do.

I intervene as little as possible, while setting clearly defined limits as to what use of materials is possible in a given class. I try to keep myself out of the work so that it can come totally from the heart and mind of the child who produces it.

I never feel that something a kid has done is really awful, although I might feel it's slapdash because he hasn't been paying enough attention to his work, but has been yakking to his neighbor about baseball for ten minutes instead. I would intervene then because I'd expect him to be more involved in what he's doing.

If a child is happy with his work, then I'm usually happy with it too. If a kid is discouraged, if his work isn't going very well, I will tell him, "This sometimes happens. You've worked hard on this. Put it over there and try another one." Children don't tend to get off track too often. But they sometimes do, and we can all learn something from our failures.

Observing the Work

How an adult responds to the child's artwork is extremely significant. It's important that a grown-up not project his or her own ideas onto the work. Asking a five- or six-year-old what his painting or drawing represents can be confusing. The painting or drawing may have one image along with many additional shapes and lines, added for the purposes of design. The teacher must strive to understand the child's aims and can accomplish this by paying close attention to what is happening. Many teachers ask the kids to explain what they're doing. I try not to do this because the work itself will tell me loud and clear if I look at it carefully. Active and close observation helps one get in touch with the child.

I rarely ask the kids what they are doing, because this would make them switch to their logical mind and become verbal rather than visual. They may not know exactly what they're doing, so we would both be stopped cold at that point. Maybe they didn't think about what they were doing, so I just try to follow them.

Adult responses succeed best when they're nonjudgmental and are as specific as possible. It is important for the adult to refer to the process in which the child is involved and to make descriptive comments about it. By describing to the child his or her exploration, the adult reinforces the child's own discoveries. The interest the adult shows is contagious. The constructive attention given the children helps them to flourish.

As I look at the work, the kind of comments I would make to the younger children might be:

• Let's look at this. Where did you make the lines? Where did you make the shapes?

• Your pencil moves fast, round and round.

• Your line goes all around the paper. That's called a border.

• This line swings to this edge of the paper and that line swings to that edge.

• You have blue at the top and bottom.

• You put red dots on top of a green shape.

• I see a big square and a little square.

• You have a shape on each side.

• I see you have yellow inside and outside the circle.

I might say to an older child:

• The triangle you used is a good shape to show the dress.

• You have made a tunnel, a tower, et cetera.

• Does your train have tracks to run on?

• Those brush marks show the texture of the animal's fur.

To deepen the discussion, as the children move into narrative art, I may ask them a number of questions about their subject and their experience with it. For example, if a girl tells me, "This is a water slide," I will ask, "Have you ever seen a water slide?" She might reply, "Yes, I went on one this summer." I may then ask, "Is going on the slide scary?" I will add that I myself have never been on one. I might also ask, "Did you go on the slide more than once?" "Was the water cold?" "Was the water deep?" "Did you go alone or with a friend?" Such questions can stimulate the girl to recall the actual experience and help make her conscious in a simple way of what she has done. After she has briefly talked about it and resumed her painting, she may remember making a splash and will include this, or perhaps put the friend in the picture. The discussion has made her aware of synthesizing the experience in her painting.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE ART OF TEACHING ART TO CHILDREN by NANCY BEAL with Gloria Bley Miller. Copyright © 2001 by Nancy Beal and Gloria Bley Miller. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.