The “Awooo!” “Grrr!” and “Roar!” you hear as you pass by may not be the sounds you expect to hear from an art classroom. On this day, however, my young artists are building a zoo to house the plastic animals I’ve included in the Architecture center in my child-centered art room. This isn’t an unusual occurrence. My early childhood students frequently focus their art-making around play, demonstrating a level of creativity beyond my wildest dreams.
Kindergartners Ellie B. and Mollie S. share the paper puppets they made at the Drawing and Collage centers.
Encouraging Creativity
I invite students to explore several centers full of different media and tools in my TAB classroom, which operates more as an artist’s studio. TAB stands for Teaching for Artistic Behavior, and in our studio, my students make and explore with the full creative autonomy of artists—choosing from the available materials, deciding what to make, and knowing when their artwork is finished.
In a TAB studio, play and art-making are often indistinguishable for both students and observers. But while students are empowered to create freely, this doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all; there’s a great deal of planning involved to ensure that students are engaged in a rigorous and meaningful art-making experience. Through guided play, I facilitate opportunities with specific learning goals in mind. This allows children a degree of choice and agency while being flexible enough to adapt to individual needs and interests.
Examples of learning goals include collaborating with friends, developing expressive language and fine motor skills, and building executive functioning skills like caring for supplies.
Implementing Guided Play
I facilitate guided play by curating a combination of appealing art media and objects that inspire open-ended ideas in each center. I don’t know what form the play will take when I set these items out, but I’m confident that my young artists will have lots of ideas, both playful and artistic. For example, at the Architecture center, when I set out KEVA Planks and Counting Bears, the artists designed bridges for the bears to cross.
The authentic artwork of children looks different from the adult aesthetic of a teacher-directed project. It might look unfinished, rushed, or unskilled, but in the end, the product of a TAB classroom is not always the works that hang on the wall, but the children who believe they are artists and who create with wild abandon and unbridled imagination.
Child-Centered Mindset
The transition to a child-centered art studio didn’t happen overnight. I continually work to overcome my fear of the messes, the waste, and the unexpected—all the trademarks of rigorous exploration and discovery. I rein in my apprehension around the loud noise and the appearance of lawlessness. It’s supposed to feel calm and orderly and studious—those are the conditions in which learning happens, right? What if someone walks in? How do I explain this joyful chaos? But if I want students to be fearless in their art-making, I have to be fearless in my teaching.
Managing the Chaos
How do I make this chaos manageable? We go slowly. We start with four simple centers: Drawing, Collage, Architecture, and Felt Board. These centers have minimal supplies for easy cleanup and organization, but still allow for ample discovery and expression. For Drawing, we have pencils, crayons, and a box of inexpensive newsprint paper. Collage has glue bottles, pre-cut squares of construction paper, and sturdy paper for the base.
Architecture includes KEVA Planks and manipulatives like pattern blocks and Cuisenaire rods. The Felt Board center is a box of pre-cut felt shapes and a recycled cork board lined with a large piece of felt. Students move freely between centers when they are ready. Some will stay at a center for five minutes; others will work at one center the entire class. They learn to look for an open chair at a table or to count the people at the floor centers to know if there’s an available space.
When it’s time to clean up, students return the supplies to the bins and bring them to me, and I store them on a shelf designated for early childhood supplies. We take extra time during the first several weeks to practice this routine until it’s established.
As we master the use and care of supplies at each center, we add more choices at Drawing and Collage, such as markers and scissors. Once we’re really in the groove, we introduce the messier centers like Painting and Playdough, using the same gradual methods. It’s not a race, and you and your students can set your own pace and use the centers and media that work for you. Students don’t need to have all the choices all the time; they’ll create with whatever you provide because they are innately creative and bursting with ideas.
What Success Looks Like
One day, I notice the artists at the Collage center are taping craft sticks on the back of their drawings to make puppets. Someone else is cutting out pieces of paper and passing them out as tickets to the show, then punching a hole in the ticket when you arrive. At the Painting center, students ask for the biggest paper to make a backdrop for the stage. The Playdough bakers have shifted their output to make “snacks” for the show. “Can we tip the table over to make the theater?” one student asks, and I say yes because I’m trying to always say yes if I can’t think of a good reason to say no. I can’t be the one who quashes this kind of creative flow. Never in a million years could I come up with something this brilliant. Well, maybe when I was five.
Claire Winkeler is an art teacher at Holy Infant School in St. Louis, Missouri. CCWinkeler@gmail.com
Art teachers start the school year with lessons that engage students while teaching them foundational skills and techniques. High-school students explore shape-based thinking and color theory while creating paintless paintings with tissue paper; middle-school students complete the second half of their self-portraits in the style of a chosen artist; elementary students utilize the elements and principles to draw realistic and abstract landscapes; young students learn about personal preferences while designing paper shoes; and more.
