| The Elementary Art Curriculum provides a framework for helping students learn the characteristics of the visual arts by using a wide range of subject matter, symbols, meaningful images, and visual expressions to reflect their ideas, feelings, and emotions. The program incorporates art history, production, critique and aesthetics. Art history allows the students to connect with artists, as well as a variety of artistic styles around the world. In production, students explore media through drawing and painting, paper construction, claywork, printmaking and sculpture. While exploring the visual world, students learn to coordinate their hands and minds while working with various tools, processes, and media. Critique encourages the child to discuss art with emphasis placed on the elements of art and principles of design. Students learn vocabularies and concepts associated with various types of work in the visual arts and exhibit their competence at various levels in visual, oral, and written forms. Through examination of their own work and that of other people, times, and places, students experience the essence of artwork and learn to appraise its purpose and value; they begin to understand the visual world in which they live. Through production and critique the child adopts an understanding of aesthetics. Art projects are frequently an extension of the grade level curriculum. The art teachers work closely with the grade level teams to plan lessons in support of specific content and themes in Social Studies, Science, and Language Arts. Students have the opportunity to utilize the art studio and the art instructor as resources. |
