forwhite.blogg.se

If the museum is extensive, pick a set of rooms that seem likely to appeal. The very idea is exhausting and makes me want to run out the door! If time allows, walk through each room of the exhibit. So lets go back to those disappointing museum visits and rethink our goals.įirst, please rid yourself of the thought that kids need to look at every item in an exhibit. (Remember those finger paints.) We want to help kids enter a world where two-and three-dimensional art has the power to communicate ideas and stir the imagination. So how do we help children find their own connections? The first step involves building experiences of discovery and glee. With that connection made, I could then branch out to embrace virtually every type of art that I encountered. And loved those images, both the glittering fairytale paintings and the gritty historical canvases documenting Russia’s messy slough through political history. Then I suddenly realized that the vivid pictures in my Russian history books and on the covers of my LPs and scores of Russian piano music were, indeed, “art”: Russian art from the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. I had studied music extensively, but growing up with little exposure, was lost at sea when it came to visual art. She thought neither she nor the kids were gaining what they were supposed to from each painting. Recently a friend confessed that, despite displaying a well-prepared enthusiasm while taking her children to museums, she always found the experience disappointing. Those things can enhance understanding, but they can also create obstacles during the initial stages of encountering art, leaving students baffled and bored. And we tend to do just that when we frontload “art appreciation” with artists biographies and stylistic labels.

But we make a mistake if we teach them that its now all about someone else’s expression. Art is no longer simply a reflection of their own self-expressions. They have a visceral connection to their self-expression in color.īut as children grow, their relationship to art changes. At the toddler stage, teaching art to kids is easy: Throw on a smock and get out the finger paints.