“What letter are we working on today?” a young art teacher asked her kindergarten students at Vaughn Elementary in Aurora.
“M!” they all reply in unison.
Today the students will be decorating matching paper mittens using color crayons, markers, and colored pencils. They will work on creating patterns and re-producing them identically on each mitten to create a match.
The teacher shows the students a few letter-based designs. An upside-down “J” made thick and decorated with stripes, becomes a candy cane. The letter “X” and a lower case “t” combined create a basic snowflake.
“I work with the gym teacher to focus on a specific letter of the day for the kindergarten age group,” she tells me. “After they do a project they will all remember what letter they were working on the last class.”
That kind of visual connection between lesson plans, school subjects and art is this art teacher’s agenda.
“Collaborations with the classroom teachers are my ultimate goal and I wish it happened more often,” she said. “We’ve talked about Geometry using Tibetan Sand Medullas with fourth and fifth graders. We’ve discussed Asian cultures with students by doing a project on Japanese Cherry Trees. By adding art to a lesson it helps the kids make more sense of it or connect to it.”
Before the children begin the art project the teacher uses certain steps to keep their minds focused on the rules of art class.
“Close your eyes and point to your brain,” she tells the students.
She asks them to focus on her example pair of mittens and point out what they notice about them. The children notice the shapes, colors, and other attributes of the art project. The students prepare for a story about the subject, in this case the letter “M” and mittens.
The teacher moves to a corner and sits on a Popasan chair, the students sit on the floor. For this lesson, she reads, “One Mitten” by Kristen O’Connell. While reading the book, she encourages the children focus on the appearance of the mittens in each drawing.
After the story the students return to their seats for more instructions. The mittens must match, the mittens should be colorful, there should be limited white space, and students should color lightly and quickly.
“Desposito,” several children say.
“That is Spanish for quickly and lightly,” the teacher tells me.
In Vaughn elementary English as a Second Language is the norm for the majority of students and they are aided through the use of examples, visual representations, and unique ways to communicate the rules. One of this teacher’s methods to encourage students to focus for further instruction involves turning off the lights and turning on a police siren so all children know to be quiet and attentive.
In this instance, the additional instructions needed involve detailed directions on how to cut with a scissors.
“Put your thumb up. Now put it in the top hole,” she explains. “Take your two fingers like a ‘peace sign’ and place them in the bottom hole. Now make an alligator mouth and open and close it. If you need to cut a corner, turn or spin your paper while you keep making the alligator mouth with your scissors.”
A very detailed, yet effective description of a tricky task, I tell her.
 “I’ve learned from watching them completely destroy stuff – you learn from the students what you need to teach them,” she says. “Kindergarteners want to be shown and need to be encouraged to have confidence in their drawn and art.”
The art classroom itself is quite large and the kindergarteners fill three large work areas. Prints of several styles of master art work, pictures, and some original art cover the classroom walls. For the older students, there is a wall of art vocabulary.
In Vaughn Elementary Kindergarteners only receive 50 minutes a week of art education with the art specials teacher. Many times it is less due to time restraints, with teachers sometimes bringing students to art class several minutes late. Time is of essence in this class and all projects must be finished in the 50 minute period or they will have to be shelved for another seven days. That factor is part of the reason, my suggestion of gluing objects on to the mittens such as buttons, gems, or glitter is not a part of this lesson. There would be no time for the art to dry and then be cut.
Before many of the students can cut out both mittens, their classroom teacher returns to take the students back. Students pick up crayons, locate caps for the markers and throw scrap paper away. Each student leaves with his or her matching mittens and a new way to think about the letter “M.”