Teaching Art

A couple weeks ago, I had the wonderful opportunity to teach art to two classes of 6th graders at Horace Mann Elementary. This is the tenth year I have been teaching art to the kids as a volunteer art docent, and yet their creativity and enthusiasm still take me by surprise! Every child is still an artist because no one has managed to talk him out of it yet!

The project was a pretty common one. The kids each selected a beautiful fall leaf to draw and paint. We talked about how you can arrange things in art - about composition and symmetry and cropping a subject to make it more interesting. They each arranged a composition with their leaves, drew the leaf on watercolor paper, and then painted it with real professional-grade Daniel Smith watercolors.

I couldn't resist giving them the same watercolor paints that I use. I think I was in high school before I got a chance to use real watercolors. What a difference they make! I'm pretty sure this was the first time any of them had ever used anything other than cheap sets of kiddie watercolors. The kids were in love with the rich saturated watercolors and how they moved around the wet paper! It was wonderful to watch how very much the kids enjoyed really studying the leaf, its shape, its beautiful colors, its amazing symmetry. Is it possible that these technology-driven information-age video-game kids could really enjoy a single leaf so much?

Several days later, I noticed one of the kids carrying a beautiful leaf home from school. When I mentioned his leaf, he said he was taking it home "to paint it". It completely made my day.

The reason for teaching art is not so much to teach kids how to draw or paint, it's to change how they see the world around them. Once you start looking at leaves, really looking at them, they are all more interesting, more beautiful. Learning how to slow down and really observe and enjoy the world is something really important to teach our children. Doing art is great way to start!