Teachers keep art alive in the classroom

In Fremont’s schools, art has become more than just plaster handprints and crepe paper trees.

Competition for tax dollars trims school budgets and sometimes, eliminating art seems like an option, but teachers who love art said they find ways to incorporate it into their classrooms.

And some of the lessons learned through art can last a lifetime.

“Much of the art I use in my room is a tool for creating community in the classroom,” explains Deb McCord, second-grade teacher at Bell Field Elementary School.

Prominently displayed on one wall of McCord’s room is a large poster ringed with cut-out self portraits of McCord’s students. Soon after school began in the fall, second-graders wrote a pledge, detailing how they would behave in their classroom — how to show kindness, be respectful of others and to take responsibility for their actions. The pledge is sealed by the likenesses surround it.

Every child is represented.

Both students and the teacher often refer to the pledge.

“When students are learning a life skill such as active listening, if I can help them put that concept into their own words or to illustrate it, it helps them to internalize the concept and make it theirs,” McCord says.

One of the class art projects has been a creation of a “Special Peace Place.”

McCord pauses, looking through the pile of pictures on her lap before she explains the activity.

“This is a calming tool for them. There are times of the day when transition is hard … after recess or when we get back to the classroom from lunch. It’s hard to settle down. These are the times that we turn down the lights, have them close their eyes and ask them to go to their peace place inside their heads,” she says.

This is the important part of the exercise: “They have that place inside their heads because they have written about it and then illustrated what that place looks like.”

The children are able to calm themselves and are ready to focus on learning.

Art carefully rendered in watercolor and pastel chalk shows calm places — water, trees, fields and animals. Blues and greens are the dominant colors in many of the pictures with splashes of the primary colors in bird and flower accents.

Many pictures are full of nature; but other places, like the library or a bedroom, serve children as places of peace as well. The children have placed themselves in the drawing, in a world of their creating — a world where they are surrounded by those things they find most peaceful.

To imagine these places, McCord began by instructing children to close their eyes and go into a special place and think about what they saw, touched and felt.

“Between the concept introduction and the finished product, the child has the space and time to define his personal place of peace. To think it, feel it, smell it, see it, hear it … so that it becomes uniquely his and a tool available throughout his life when he needs centering and calming,” she says.

The children wrote about their “Special Peace Place” before they began to illustrate it.

One child wrote, “Hushhhh. Hushhhh. I hear the wind blowing telling me to hushhhh. I feel the water on my hand. I hear a butterfly’s wings snipping like scissors.”

The quiet place for this second-grader illustrates the water, the wind blown clouds and the butterfly. Another child drew a dialogue of a conversation he has with his mother in this special place that ends, “I like lying in the grass with my mom.”

Annette Holtam teaches elementary art at Grant and Bell Field.

A recent project involved the study of the print of a painting by Henri Matisse. The print depicts a glass bowl on a round table. The bowl contains four gold fish swimming in the water. The fish are reflected on the top surface of the water.

“The teachers will teach the kids how to draw a round object to make it look three dimensional rather than flat. They will learn how to curve the bottom and the top of the bowl and how to add shadows at the edges. We use oil pastels to do this so that they can blend colors. They will draw their own little fishes and cut then them out to place in the bowl. Form is our word for this lesson. All year long we teach the seven elements of art: line, color, shape, space, value, form and texture. We try to give the students an experience in as many media as we can over the year,” Holtam explains.

Another project will be to study a winter scene by Grandma Moses.

Third-graders will talk about the lack of famous women artists and discuss how this woman always wanted to paint and how she waited to be a grandma before she began painting.

They will talk about how artists paint things that are familiar to them. After they talk about the picture and all the things they see, the children will create their own picture using the concepts they observed. They will be asked to notice how houses and buildings that are far away are tiny and those closer have more detail and are larger.

“The fun part is,” Holtam says with a smile, “that I have some snow glitter for the tops of the houses and for the snow on the hills. They like that.”

Fremont second- and third-graders are learning how to effectively express themselves using another medium besides language. They study how artists have found ways to tell about their world and their times and are given the tools to explore the elements of drawing.

Some of their work will be on display at the annual art show March 4-29 at Fremont Area Art Association building.