Throughout the year children at The New School participate in school wide art projects. One of the first projects this year was “Cube Art” which used cardboard cubes, aka boxes. Each student decided on an overarching idea and drew a group of six related pictures. We then glued the pictures to the six faces of the cube. Children took a lot of time creating their themed drawings. Their ideas were widely varied. People represented their families, their friends, pictures related to a holiday, favorite foods, favorite activities, numbers, Pokemon characters, animals, dragons, sea creatures, and more! 

For a Valentine’s Day art project children were shown a slideshow of Henri Matisse’s magical cutouts. After discussing his use of color and shape, children created their own cutout which was attached to their Valentine bag. 

Our children thoroughly enjoyed our annual tradition of creating Leprechaun traps on St. Patrick’s Day. To get into the mood, children listened to stories celebrating Irish folklore. The art room became a frenzy of gold and green paper, cardboard, and glitter, as children worked in three dimension to create luxurious rooms for the leprechauns to enjoy. Leprechauns were enticed to stay and enjoy swimming pools, beds, slides and so much more. In April the children were invited to create their own camouflage art, inspired by the book Mr. Seahorse by Eric Carle. This book features water color paintings of sea creatures with a transparent overlay of plants, rocks, and other things from the environment that camouflage the creature. We talked about camouflage and why it’s important for animals. We looked at the pictures and noticed color, shape, texture, pattern, and line and their role in camouflage. We then drew or painted a creature and created our own overlays using clear plastic binder sleeves. There were many different ideas and discussions about the nature of camouflage and how visual elements can fool the eye!