The Art of Teaching Art to Children: In School and at Home

I used to teach art to 4-8 graders some 30+ years ago, then left to work in a corporation. I've retired and was given an opportunity to teach art in a homes school resource center. The kids are free to attend class or not so I need to give them a good reason to come back again. It's been so long, I needed some inspiration and guidance. I didn't want to just keep them busy but work with them on the right developmental level and help them see themselves as artists. My current class is 4-8 year-olds. This book helped me create a big vision. It encouraged me to do things that I would never have thought about on my own -- like doing something over and over again to get the kids to go deeper with it. What I love most about it is the way she guided me to talk to the children. It sure has paid off. I can see it in the physical reactions of the kids when I observe and comment on their artwork. I have one little boy whose family is very stressed right now because his brother is not well. He was so grateful when I looked at something he'd done and simply said, I see you love the color blue. I started with 5 kids, I'm up to 9 and they want me to add another class next term for the 9-11 year-olds. There is great information in this book for both of those age groups. My thanks to the authors for their help with this new adventure.

This book is the best I have seen about how to teach art to children, and I have looked at a lot of them. She talks about what kids can do developmentally in art at different ages and she has a great open-ended approach with lots of motivating questions to develop the projects further into the kids' own ideas. She organizes the book into drawing, painting, clay, printmaking, construction, collage, and social studies. And best of all, not only do I love this book, but the ideas I have tried with my kids have been huge successes. She includes lots of practical advice from her 25 years experience and enough material to be doing art all year with kids, and the next, and the next. This book has me covered for homeschool art for a long time. And it is so enjoyable to read with pictures of her students' art.

THE AUTHOR REALLY HAS SOMETHING VALUABLE & IMPORTANT TO SHARE W/ THE READER.Less instructional, more guiding.A great book for someone who is teaching or just creating art with children. I am a stay at home Mom with an "alternative" in home daycare. We focus on the arts & mindfulness. This book teaches a very mindful approach to working with children to create art. There were a lot of "little" things I never considered before, that are actually really "BIG" things. Especially when working with children, it's easy to forget how fragile they are & how easily your instructions and feedback during something fun like art can be unconsciously affecting the self esteem and confidence of your students/children. This book is a good tool for building your children/students up, and turning art into a tool for them to creatively express themselves and build the confidence needed to do so freely and naturally all throughout life!

This book has some interesting ideas for projects and gives some examples for how one can "jump start" students who might be having a hard time getting going on a project. I thought there were some really good tips for organization and for saving time.I found the tone of the book off-putting though. There are many places in the book where she talks about how "other" teachers teach in a certain way and then talks about how her way is SO much better. I am a new teacher, and in all of the examples she gave, I could see merit in BOTH ways she described. Seems like she could have presented her own way without putting down someone else. I thought the tone was rather arrogant, frankly.

This is a great book to get you started if you are attempting to teach art to children. Art can be taught in so many different ways and there are so many different views on how to teach art. This method of teaching is based on providing materials to children and allowing them to be entirely creative with very little direction. I haven't tried teaching this method yet but I am interested to see how it goes. I was looking for a curriculum that gave me a little more art instruction and talked a little bit about famous artists and famous works of art. That isn't what this book is about but it did offer an approach to teaching art that I had not considered. This book talks mostly about teaching children how to use art materials. If the children are comfortable using the art materials then they will have the freedom to express their creativity with those materials. I think this book is valuable and I am excited to use the ideas presented. I think the best thing about the book is that it gives you as the teacher some valuable tips on how to talk to children about their own art. Sometimes what we say to children about their art changes how they feel about their own work. I think teachers have the ability to instill great confidence but too often we don't know how to do that. With the help of this book I hope to effectively talk to my students about their work and allow their creativity to motivate their work rather than my preconceived ideas.

New art teacher here. I absolutely love this book. I am still reading it but I have learned so much already. Nancy talks alot about how much freedom she gives her students to explore and how she does it. It really motivated me to try to do the same. It also helped me to know what to say when viewing work, how to help them, etc. Her approach to teaching art is wonderful and inspiring. I would love to observe her teaching.