Curriculum: Art and Shop at the School for Children

Art and Shop in the Middle School

In their first year in the Middle School, children come to the art and shop studios for the first time. Painting, drawing, clay, collage and construction, paper mache, and printmaking are done in the art room. Shop has wood, a variety of construction materials, and carpentry tools. As children gain an understanding and appreciation of the expressive qualities of materials, they develop skills and discover their potential for creating increasingly complex subject matter in art and shop. While 6/7s are primarily focused on the world of family and neighborhood, the world of the 7/8s and 9/10s broadens and deepens to include relationships with friends, workers in different cultures and communities, and more abstract situations encountered through books, films, museums, television, and computer. Their artwork often reveals complex narratives filled with visual detail, spatial understandings and organization, and elaborate compositions of shape, form, line, and color.

The shop program at Bank Street is a fine arts curricula, primarily using wood, along with a variety of other materials. It is a place to explore three-dimensionally in a personal, inventive way. Children enter the room motivated to get to work and handle the sculpture and carpentry tools in order to transform wood in a multitude of ways. Shaping wood with saws, chisels, files, and sandpaper and joining it by hammering, using the screwdriver, the drill, gluing, and clamping are some of the ways children meet the challenges of this resistant material. It is a time that is constructive and legitimately noisy, that has an element of play to it, while simultaneously being hard work. The curricula in Shop allow children to freely choose and realize their personal visions; it also has a developmental agenda- to foster the mastery of tools and sculptural concepts that can expand children's skills and ideas.

The Art and Shop teacher's role is to help children visualize, distill, and relate the salient aspects of their experiences to their knowledge of the materials. Classes start with a discussion to help children identify subject matter and think through the process of handling materials and tools. During these discussions, children may learn about and respond to the arts of a variety of cultures through the use of slides and reproductions. The Art and Shop teachers meet with the Middle School coordinator and teachers to plan curriculum-related work in the art room, shop, and classrooms. Children investigate and appreciate the arts and crafts of the culture they are studying and recreate their understandings through different sensorial materials. The integration of art into social studies, language arts, math, and science curricula allows children to personally identify with their studies through creative individual work that then deepens their learning.