It’s exciting to incorporate a bit of history into an art lesson, and this jewelry design project afforded a perfect opportunity. We took our five- and six-year-old artists on an excursion to the furthest corner of the Philadelphia museum of art, through a series of period rooms bringing us deeper into the past, to a small room filled with Georgian miniatures. Students absorbed all the details of the intricate, tiny portraits in the gallery before we settled in to talk about what we had come to see: the museum’s collection eye miniatures, or Lover’s Eyes.
Art teachers express the concept of joy as it relates to art. Students create miniature, wearable eye portraits to gift to family and friends; collaborate with professional artists on an annual pen pal drawing project; assemble mixed-media boxes based on their favorite mythological stories; create highly individualized large-scale portraits; respond to street art and local mural festivals; and more.
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