|
Art classes at Friends School begin with 3-year-olds and continue through middle school. For the preschool students, art is an exploration of sensory materials. During each class meeting, children make choices among the play-dough and rice centers, open easel, sketchbook drawing, and teacher-guided projects. They explore art on many levels through study of color, line, shape, form, pattern, and texture.
Older students study renowned artists and engage in projects using each artist’s style as they explore and create using a wide variety of media and techniques. Art projects often relate to the units of study occurring in students’ classrooms. Student artists learn about composition and elements of design, including line, color, form, value, shape, texture and space. They learn to build their drawing skills by exploring different techniques of drawing, including contour, blind contour, and gesture drawing. Art students also learn to create using more than one medium and technique for a single piece, and in doing so they experiment with everything from pastes, paper, and paint to charcoal, sand and mosaic tiles. For example, they may sculpt not only with clay, but with soap, wire, papier-mâché, or by carving subtractive sculpture from cast plaster and sawdust forms.
Art is also integrated into the academic classroom. In science, students might make a pictorial study of a given organism or a 3-D model of crustal folding. In social studies, students build replica pottery while studying local Native American culture. In language arts, students create visual aids for book reports and illustrations for their published writing. In mathematics, students might create tessellations or Escher-like patterns.
Schedule a Tour
| 
