http://www.nga.gov/kids/kids.htm

Welcome to the Art Room

          My name is Ms. Smith I am the new Art Teacher at Island Avenue. I come from the Hartford area where I have just completed a year of substitute teaching for various school districts. I have also recently completed the Post Baccalaureate certification program in Art Education at Central State University. My previous background was in illustrating and designing games for children’s educational software programs.
          It is a pleasure and a privilege to be counted as a member of the Island Avenue School staff. The students here are intelligent, creative and energetic. My focus for each grade is to introduce and explain the principles and elements of art, along with providing each child experience with a variety of media, art styles and famous artists.

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach
By Elliot Eisner

The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.

The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source  and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young  what adults believe is important.

Elliott Eisner, in Beyond Creating: The Place for Art in America's Schools. Getty Center for Education in the Arts. 1985 p. 69.