Introduction
Worthington Hooker, a k-4 elementary school, was designated by the city of New Haven as a mini-arts magnet school. The term “magnet” indicates that it draws students from every part of the city because of the strength of its arts program; the term “mini” refers to the fact that the school remains first of all committed to being a neighborhood school. Due to its proximity to Yale University graduate student housing, the school population reflects that international community, and students at Worthington Hooker come from twenty-five to thirty-five countries. Students, then, represent many varied cultural groups. There is at the school a widespread consensus that art activities, rather than being a separate subject and perhaps a “frill”, are an integral part of how children learn and grow, and an important mode of expression.
Through art, students not only learn basic concepts that they then can use in other areas (kindergarten children learn to read and clap rhythmic patterns from left to right before they read words; students can learn pattern and sequence in music and visual art before studying it in math), but are actively and affectively involved in learning through their own art. In an age when technology encourages passive reception of received ideas—when programmed workbooks, computer programs and achievement tests encourage “the right answer”—it is even more important to develop skills of independent observation, critical comparison and individual expression.
In most years, a school-wide theme at Worthington Hooker has focused on a sharing, through art activities, of the different cultures represented at the school. As art is a direct expression of the spirit of a culture, active engagement in the arts of another culture allows students to enter into and understand it better. This unit differs in that place (New England) remains constant
and circumscribed, and the focus is on change through time. Examining New England children’s lives at two different stages of American history, colonial and federal, through artifacts and art projects, and comparing these historical childhoods with their own, may not only help to focus the experience of international students on a particular place, but help American-born children to understand the history and mores of their own culture.
As arts coordinator this past year, I was responsible for coordinating resources, trips, activities, and visiting artists, and for teaching art classes around a common theme, as well as organizing a culminating celebration—all-day, school-wide performances, exhibits and sharing of activities. This current unit will focus on a sequence of art projects for third and fourth grades that may be coordinated with the classroom teacher’s social studies, science, math, and language art activities, and could culminate in a school-wide sharing of activities. I have been discussing and coordinating this curriculum with another seminar member, Jeanne Sandahl, who is a fourth grade teacher in the same school.
Unit Objectives
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1. To explore with students two time periods of another culture (albeit one that is related to some of us historically), using active investigative methods in social studies, language and visual arts, and science.
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2. To increase student abilities in observation, description, in making comparisons, and expression.
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3. To increase students’ awareness of their own place in society and history through a comparison of these other times with their own.
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4. To increase art skills, and familiarity with art materials.
Strategies
The anticipated duration of the unit is fifteen weeks, with one art period a week for each of four classes, third and fourth grades. In general, this interdisciplinary unit will combine:
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1. Slide presentations
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a. Children as portrayed in paintings
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b. Samplers
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2. Field trips: to The British Art Center, Center Church on the green, the Eli Whitney Museum, the New Haven Colony Historical Society, the Pardee Morris House, the Yale Art Gallery. Field trips will be preceded by a class discussion that generates student questions, and will be followed by an opportunity to record experiences.
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3. Art projects, of varying class duration from one class to a period of a month.
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a. Ongoing: drawing from observation for fifteen to twenty minutes at the beginning of each class; a class timeline that includes drawings, as places are visited, and as historical figures and objects are studied.
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b. Discrete: personal timeline; maps; self-portraits; sampler.
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4. Language arts: readings, classroom discussions and followup written exercises either in the classroom or as homework.
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a. Ongoing: then-and-now worksheets; journals; reading aloud in class.
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b. Discrete: examining objects from our own culture.
The development of skills in formal object analysis, as introduced in this seminar, “The Family in Art and Material Culture”, will be an ongoing and cooperative class activity. Both the image and self-image of children can be discussed and compared in terms of the child’s place in the family, experience in school and kinds of recreation.
Slides, maps and written material in the resource packet and available at the Yale-New Haven Teacher’s Institute range in time period from early New England colonial (1641) through the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries.
