A title, a cover, and pages with "substance" bound together--this is what the author's eighth-grade students decided were the essential elements of a book. There could be more, but no less. In art, one does judge a book by its cover. In this article, the author describes how her students created their books. (Contains 1 online resource.)

This article describes a project that was inspired by the Chinese Festival of Lanterns. In this project, students had the opportunity and challenge of using a variety of media to represent a range of values to create form from shape. The lanterns proved to be an interesting subject for the drawings, as well as a way to increase students' knowledge…

Telling art students to do anything they want can be dangerous. It's not something teachers often do, but this is a project where anything goes. In this article, the author describes how her students created a Mardi Gras type mask, then incorporated it into a mixed-media composition.

In this article, the author describes an art project--a school-wide sticky-note show. The show was inspired by Giant Robot's annual Post-It Show in Los Angeles. The gallery invites hundreds of artists to doodle, draw, paint, and collage onto sticky notes. The individual sticky notes can be silly, ambitious, conceptual, or beautiful, but the…

Kids love to build robots, letting their imaginations run wild with thoughts of what they might look like and what they could be programmed to do. Yet when students use cereal boxes and found objects to make robots, often the projects look too similar and tend to fall apart. This alternative allows students to "build" robots in a different way,…

Glass as an art form is anything but new. Three thousand years ago the Egyptians were molding glass beads and shaping elegant glass perfume bottles. In this article, the author describes how his students created sun catchers inspired by the beauty of Notre Dame's stained glass windows and the intrigue of Dale Chihuly's sculptures. (Contains 1…

To the general public, the topic of art education conjures up images of pencil drawings and tempera paint. If asked what a student might learn in an art class, a typical response might be that they will be taught how to draw and paint. This interpretation isn't totally incorrect, as drawing and painting are activities preformed in most artrooms.…

In this article, the author describes how students can create a stunning as well as economical mosaic utilizing fall's brilliantly colored leaves, preserved at their peak in color. Start by choosing a beautiful fall day to take students on a nature walk to collect a variety of leaves in different shapes, sizes, and colors. Focus on collecting a…

It was nearing the end of a very long, rough winter with a lot of snow and too little time to play outside. The snow had formed small hills and valleys over the bushes and this was at the perfect height for the students to paint. In this article, the author describes how her transitional first-grade students created snow art paintings. (Contains 1…

Exploring idea and media while developing skills is always an interesting challenge in the middle grades. Often, the daunting task of having to draw a self-portrait turns some students away, so the author set out to create portraits with realistic likenesses while incorporating an exploration of multiple materials and allowing an expressive…

Born in Cumberland, Maryland, Nancy Sansom Reynolds earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from George Washington University in Washington, DC in 1982. Reynolds' reputation as a sculptor has steadily grown over the years, and today her artwork is included in many private and public collections and has been displayed in the United States, Asia,…

Art is about thinking. It requires persistence and a willingness to explore many options for solving problems. These are not quantifiable measurements but, more significantly, they rely on students' increasing development of the ability to learn through exploration, experimentation, self-questioning, and self-assessment. Using paper, scissors, and…

A ballerina, a gladiator, a camper, a baseball player, a surfer, and a shopper; these are just a few of the amazing monkeys that the author's seventh graders created from papier-mache. This project provided an opportunity for students to express themselves through the creation of sculptural characters based on their own interests, hobbies, and…

Popular culture is a relatively new area of study in the artroom, and combining it with the demands of a rigorous curriculum requires some thought. Combining threads from several sources was the key to an exciting exploration of pattern inspired by a newspaper headline. In 2006, a landmark case was settled in Austria, which repatriated five famous…

Best known for his monumental abstract sculptures of reclining figures, Henry Moore's forms are generally pierced or have a hollow space within them. Some say that these "organic undulating forms" are reminiscent of the landscape of his home in Yorkshire, England. Moore was a giant in the world of sculpture and his large cast bronzes and marble…