Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning

by Diamond, Julie

  Several years ago, a rather rigid art teacher came every week to my kindergarten class. The lessons were highly prescriptive; each lesson had one aim. One week, children were introduced to “form”: shown how drawn lines could enclose space to produce forms. The teacher told the children to use the forms to make animals, which they would then paint. One very independent boy had drawn and painted his animal; he was clearly pleased with himself and finished with the piece. The art teacher wanted him to paint in the background, and he, equally insistent, refused. Teachers, validly, wonder about how to move children forward; but this teacher’s strategy was an example of how not to proceed, an example of a teacher imposing her idea. She pestered him until he finally said, “This animal lives at the North Pole, and that [pointing to the background] is the snow.” With that, he’d won, using his creative powers to defeat her decisively (on her own turf, so to speak, as an artist) and to hold on to his right to make his own work.

  Certain materials don’t allow much play for the imagination; they permit only one use or interpretation. With these materials, children’s work is excessively product-oriented; children have no opportunities to judge, ponder, and make decisions. At the opposite end of the spectrum are materials like play dough or clay, which allow children a range of transformations. Collage, using found materials, is an art form that is extremely well adapted to children’s imaginative uses.

  First, there’s the stuff itself. Torn paper, paper that’s shiny, rough, or smooth, all sorts of textured materials (corrugated cardboard, burlap, sandpaper); materials that are thick or thin, fat or skinny; found objects of all sorts (tops of markers, tops of juice or milk containers, bread tags; tiny beads; pebbles, bark, and shells; metal bits)—all of these things appeal to children’s senses directly and immediately. These are the things children notice lying on the ground, things they pick up and pocket. At the end of the school day, feeling like an archaeologist, I empty my pockets and find these. As children choose and arrange these objects, their decisions are both aesthetic and personal.

  For this class of children, collage had a very strong appeal. Looking back, I would say that their work with collage defined the class. Collage found its way into everything we did. I introduced collage in October, after the class had explored the use of the shape templates, and had also begun to learn about care of materials. I gave the children pieces of mat board, cut into different sizes, as a base for the materials glued on top.2 I set out a variety of collage materials. As children finished their collages, I let them paint around or on top of the glued forms, so that the work was produced in two separate stages. This process was extremely popular. Children welcomed the opportunity to go back into a piece of work and add more color. The layering of work gave them even more choice and artistic freedom. It allowed for an especially rich construction of the surface of the work.

  All year, as the children continued to make collages, I continued to add new materials—popsicle sticks, cardboard tubes and boxes, straws, coffee stirrers. As the year proceeded, children began to work on pieces for several days. They built longer, larger, more complex pieces that were, essentially, constructions. They would tape two pieces of mat board together to accommodate their expanding work; sometimes friends would work together on a piece.

  We used multimedia processes, in varying combinations: crayon or Cray-Pas with watercolor on top, collage plus Cray-Pas plus watercolor, printing techniques with added watercolor or Cray-Pas, and construction with collage and paint. The practice of combining different media invited experimentation and playfulness. Further, the layering of materials, the adding on of diverse elements, is a metaphor for learning itself, for what occurs when children integrate new experiences with what they already know and make accommodations that redefine the whole. Whatever the causes, when children are involved in multimedia projects, their commitment is impressive, and they produce some of their most vivid and compelling work.

  A Path That Doesn’t Go Any Place Special

  Teaching art has to do with the difference between trusting children and believing you must teach them everything about a subject or they won’t know it.

  When I came to P.S. 87, every class received art instruction. A parent at the school had developed the lessons, which were taught by parents whom she’d trained. The lessons were highly structured and technique-based. Children made color wheels in order to learn to mix colors. To make self-portraits, they drew ovals, which they then bisected vertically and horizontally, so that the features could be positioned correctly. The results were hung in the hallways, and I found the resulting work disheartening—the color wheels, the nearly identical oval faces, the stiff drawings devoid of personality.

  When my kindergarten classes had their art classes, I was an unhappy observer. For their first painting lesson, children were given containers of red, blue, and yellow paint. They were shown how to mix orange, then green, then purple, one color at a time. After this, the children were allowed to paint using all six colors, but they had to listen to different pieces of music and paint according to the kind of music they heard. Instead of trusting children to explore, allowing them the excitement of their own discoveries, the lesson directed their every move. For children with extensive painting experience, it was overdirected; for those with little experience, it was frustrating. The musical “motivation” was a distraction.

  Lessons like these put children’s expressive abilities in the backseat. George Szekely, an artist-teacher who describes himself as “a student of the children’s world,” critiques this approach in his book Encouraging Creativity in Art Lessons.3 The criteria he proposes include, centrally, whether lessons help develop students’ understanding of the creative process. He asks, What are the student’s choices, how much room is there for individuality? When a specific lesson produces results that are “illustrations of [the teacher’s] plans,” then too much of the “creative decision-making was controlled by the teacher.” The discovery and exploration that should be a component of the art experience was the teacher’s, when the lesson was shaped. These lessons take children’s art as a stage on the way to adult art.4

  This year, the school administration had decided to make a change: the kindergarten classes would be taught by Andrea Kantrowitz, an artist from Studio in the Schools, a nonprofit organization. Andrea worked with us for eleven weeks in the late winter and spring. She was a great match for the class: she was genuinely interested in children’s art. She met with me first, before coming in to teach, wanting to know what kinds of work the children had been doing and what they would be studying; she set her lessons in the context of the class’s prior experiences.

  Andrea’s carefully planned lessons introduced specific artistic elements but allowed for maximum exploration; they were, in a sense, highly revisable, provisional encounters designed to spark children’s involvement. Exploration was guided; its parameters were set by the materials and their uses, yet it was open enough to permit each child’s experience and unique preferences to inform the approach to the materials. Andrea believed art could be taught but that it shouldn’t be taught prescriptively. Her goal was to help children develop their abilities to see, design, use color; to help them extend their visual vocabulary; to help them gain clarity and conviction, while making something that was authentically theirs.

  Children, Andrea told me, “naturally have their own likes and dislikes.” We had been discussing how she worked with children on wood constructions: “I talk to them about balance, about height, and about bridging. How can you make the piece tall? How can you support something? Then I let them work.” She said she watched how the children work, and took note of their distinctive styles and methods. For some, she said, narrative elements are strong—the piece tells a story. They’ll tell the teacher, “and this is . . .” For others, design is central: pieces display symmetry, or elements are placed in sequential series. Others build: one girl had used the whole period to discover engineering principles, figuring out how t
o cantilever the pieces of wood.

  Creative expression, Andrea said, isn’t limited to the emotions. Mathematical ideas can be expressed in art as well. Andrea sees ideas repeated as children work together at a table, observing, adapting, influencing each other. At the end of the art period, the children look at each others’ work and comment on what they see. Andrea’s focus on children’s engagement with the task—her sensitivity to children’s level and method of engagement—helped her look at a piece of work with them; it helped her plan. As Andrea’s visits continued, I saw her use her repertoire of activities, adapting lessons to the class rather than expecting the children to adapt to the lessons. She also gave the class sketchbooks, in which they drew at the end of art periods. Sometimes they drew what they’d made—and these representations of their own artworks were marvelous. In the course of our time with this program, the sketchbooks became increasingly used and valued.

  In the spring, the issue of how art should be taught was brought up at a staff meeting. We had to decide whether to continue to fund the parent-taught program. Many teachers defended the program; others criticized it. The heated debate forced me to clarify my own ideas about teaching art: There are things you train kids to do—wiping brushes, looking at the whole paper—things you want to become ingrained, automatic. But you don’t need to give them a lesson in looking at the whole paper; you don’t need a lesson to teach children to think about rhythm, contrast, movement of line. They can learn to see those aspects of art as they work. Then it gets woven into their thinking about the work they’re making. A high school art student can validly be asked to produce a piece of work using only one color and black and white. But for elementary school students to make something that revolves around a narrowly set problem is a waste of an art period, too scarce a thing to waste. To whatever extent young children study art, their work should be inspired by their own desire to create art.

  Two out-of-the-classroom experiences contributed to the children’s feelings about art, and their ability to talk about art. Denay’s mother offered to arrange a visit for the class to the Whitney Museum, where there was an exhibition of work by Romare Bearden. A painter and collagist, Bearden’s works are accessible in subject matter but still somehow mysterious. I made an appointment for the class, and one February day, off we went to the Whitney, accompanied by many parents. The museum was closed when we visited, and we had the galleries to ourselves. Jane Royale, from the Education Department, met us, and she chose three works for the class to focus on. As she talked with the children, they sat very still and concentrated on the work. Her questions were specific yet open-ended, and sparked long, intense discussions: We looked first at a painting of a family. What objects were included in the painting, and why had they been included? What could the children say about the gestures the people were making? Why had he painted what he painted—who were the people? What could we guess about how they were feeling? The children were so precise about what they were seeing: “I think he is angry because of the way his hand is.” The next day, the children dictated a thank-you letter and made collages to include with the letter.

  Another February day, overcast and gray: out again, this time to Central Park. Christo’s Gates project, huge orange curtains hung at intervals along the paths, had turned the park’s winter landscape into a bright, gigantic public sculpture. The class bounded along the paths. Returning to the classroom, the children talked about what they’d seen. Their comments showed their ability to think for themselves. Michael: it’s like a path that doesn’t go to any place special. Vanessa: I didn’t like them because there was no painting. Max: it was boring because it didn’t do anything. Lizzie: I liked it because Central Park didn’t have any color.

  What elements did our two art trips add? There is a difference, I think, between making art and talking about it, between having art as part of your everyday life and knowing that it can be something out of the ordinary, something you go to see. The discussion at the museum contributed to their belief that they could talk about art. Both trips showed the children that they could bring what they had learned about art in the classroom to their thinking about art that was out in the world.

  Art in the Curriculum

  I watch Rosie draw animals for her alphabet book. She starts with the feet and draws an outline. The parts end up totally out of proportion, and she gets discouraged. I have to help her see what she knows about the animals she’s drawing.

  In the fall, a number of children worked on art projects with concentration and interest, but the work of most of the others was quick and slapdash. By the end of the year, all the children drew constantly and with intensity; they taped their drawings to the walls; they hated it when I told them to put away their sketchbooks. The change in the course of the year resulted, to an extent, from the way art was taught: both Andrea and I always put children’s expressiveness first. Art activities were valued, as well, because the class environment was rich in art. Art was part of everything the children did, part of all content areas: they illustrated poems, drew the classroom animals and plants, printed with the leaves we’d collected in the park, and made collages to illustrate information about the animals they were studying. They used math materials to make elaborate and beautiful patterns, which they then copied; they drew on wipe-off boards. They did “food color experiments,” mixing food colors in water, writing the equations (2 blue + 3 red), and saving the resulting colors on coffee filter papers. The children brought to the various experiences a sense of joy and a high level of personal involvement. They had complete confidence in themselves as producers of art, whatever their actual degree of skill. They communicated ease in making art and thinking about art.

  Display of children’s drawings

  Photo by Julie Diamond

  Toward the end of the year, the class undertook a study of undersea animals. The children chose the animals they wanted to study, and as the weeks passed and the children engaged in research on their animals, they drew incessantly. Drawings, with text, were displayed: colorful jellyfish, starfish, sharp-toothed sharks, and playful dolphins. A group of boys who were studying octopuses and squids made numerous beautiful pen drawings of giant squids, the squids floating alone, trailed by clouds of ink, or grappling with sperm whales. One result of the study was a book about undersea animals that the children wrote and illustrated. The children also made fish prints, painting a flounder and pressing paper to its scaly body.

  With Andrea, they made undersea-animal mobiles, a project that took several weeks. They drew and cut out animals from oak tag, then collaged burlap onto them. The next week, they printed from the collaged shapes. Next, with parents’ help, we made mobiles from the painted animals, which were hung in the school lobby for the Studio in the Schools exhibition. On their own, children made paper sharks, dolphins, jellyfish, and starfish, which we hung from the lights.

  Our last class project was a K-104 aquarium, which the families came to see as part of our end-of-year celebration. All the children made models of sea animals. They first used plasticene for practice and then made models with a hardening material, which they painted. Several children constructed an aquarium from blocks, with areas for different animals. They labeled their animals and placed them, on pieces of cardboard, in the aquarium. Overhead, the jellyfish waved their tentacles, the dolphins leaped, sharks exposed their teeth—a sea of creatures, hanging from the lights.

  What energized the class in all this work over many weeks, what drew the children in, were not only their feelings about sea creatures, deep as those feelings were, but their commitment to producing art. The commitment grew out of a year of making art; it was fueled by art-related trips, by their work with Andrea, and by the class environment. They had gained a sense of themselves as proficient in art, and further, their art experiences gave them a model of what work can be.

  They had come to translate their feelings as individuals into a thorough valuing of their role as contributors to the class. Their i
ndividualism had not been lost or submerged. The aquarium was something they had truly created together. Working with confidence, as a group, they had transformed the world of the classroom. At the end of the year, they had created an environment that reflected not only what they had learned but whom they had become.

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  Finding Curriculum: A Study of Squirrels

  Tooth Marks: Children Observe the World Around Them

  Yesterday, after a few days of talking about squirrels, one came and hung on the window grill. We watched, described what the squirrel was doing—then Caroline asked, How does he balance like that?

  Every fall, I’ve studied trees and leaves with my class. The city sidewalks, playgrounds, and streets are awash with fallen leaves, seed balls, acorns, and maple keys. Young children often walk to school with eyes on the ground, searching for finds that they will proudly present to teachers. I bring in acorns and twisty honey-locust pods, letting students sort through them and break open the pods to find the shiny seeds. We exhibit all of these on trays, in containers, on the science table. The children write labels, using junior tree guides. They start collecting more leaves and nuts, looking at the varieties of leaves and observing the differences. They make leaf rubbings and leaf prints. I make a photocopy of ginkgo, oak, and sycamore leaves and reproduce it for a homework assignment: children are to look for these leaves, which are distinctive and easily found in the school’s neighborhood.