Art Workshop for Children is not just another book of straightforward art projects. The book's unique child-led approach provides a framework for cultivating creative thinking and encourages the wonder that comes when children are allowed to freely explore the creative process and their materials. As children work through these open-ended workshops, adults are guided on how to be facilitators who provide questions, encourage deep thinking, and help spark an excitement for discovery. Children explore basic materials and workshops that use minimal supplies, and then gradually add new materials to fill the art cabinets as well as new skills and more complex workshops. Most workshops are suitable to preschool-aged children, and each contains ideas for explorations and new twists to engage older or more experienced artists. Interspersed throughout are sidebar essays that introduce perspectives on mess-making, imperfection, the role of adult, collaborative art, and thoughts on the Reggio Emilia method, a self-guided teaching philosophy. These pieces underscore the value of art-making with children, and support the parent/teacher/care-giver on how to successfully lead, question, and navigate their children through the workshops to result in the fullest experiences.

A guide to twelve children's art workshops by one of the world's most innovative facilitators and best–selling bookmakers. Art Workshops for Children is a guide for parents and teachers to organize and execute artistic workshops for children. 12 workshops are featured, each offering a list of materials needed, a step–by–step guide to facilitation, practical tips, illustrated examples, and photos of workshops in progress. The workshops are designed to spark children's imaginations, champion group bonding, and give visually pleasing results – with no artistic ability required. Tried and tested around the world by children of all ages. Perfect for organizing group events at home, in schools, at parties, at museums – anywhere!

Help kids build confidence and find their own creative voice through this collection of 25+ invitations for drawing. In Drawing Workshop for Kids, art educator Samara Caughey, founder of the highly praised family-centered art studio Purple Twig, shares drawing activities that support the development of creative, confident children ages 7 and up. All kids need to begin engaging in the pleasure of these simple yet inspiring drawing projects are a pencil and paper. Along the way, new materials are introduced, giving kids the opportunity to experiment with new techniques. Each of the three main chapters—drawing from life, drawing from images, and inventive drawing—focuses on techniques to explore, such as observation, mark making, shadow, line, composition, detail, contour, and perspective. Drawing Workshop for Kids strives to inspire children to investigate drawing and develop their own approach to art, building creativity and confidence.

Be inspired and delighted by Collage Workshop for Kids, a colorful art instruction book on collage techniques for children—made in cooperation with The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Collage Workshop for Kids pairs essays by educators from The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art with instructions on collage technique. Chapters explore favorite art themes for kids and demonstrate how to work with colored tissue paper, newspaper, fabric and buttons, painted paper, torn paper, and more. In each chapter, Reggio-inspired author and teacher Shannon Merenstein explores each technique with original ideas. Members of the museum's education staff offer expert advice on creating art with children. Everything you need to know about collage is in this book, making it a great reference for teachers, librarians, and parents.

How should we understand children’s creativity? This fascinating collection of international research offers fresh perspectives on children’s creative processes and the expression of their creative imagination through dramatic play, stories, artwork, dance, music and conversation. Drawing on a range of research evidence from innovative educational initiatives in a wide variety of countries, Exploring Children’s Creative Narratives develops new theoretical and practical insights that challenge traditional thinking about children’s creativity. The chapters, written by well-respected international contributors: offer new conceptual and interpretive frameworks for understanding children’s creativity contest conventional discourses about the origins and nature of creativity challenge the view that young children’s creativity can only be judged in terms of their creative output explore the significance children themselves attribute to their creative activity argue the need for a radical reappraisal of the influence of the sociocultural context on children’s creative expression discuss the implications of this research in relation to teacher education and curriculum design. This broad yet coherent compilation of research on creativity in childhood is essential reading for students, researchers and policy makers in early childhood as well as for Early Years professionals with a particular interest in creativity.

This book explores tools and techniques for creating the arts with groups. It provides insights into why workshops are such an effective and relevant form of creative practice. Throughout, two experienced practitioners share successful principles and qualities. They also include examples of workshops that explore ways of facilitating creative exploration. The authors believe that underpinning any good workshop practice is an understanding of what constitutes a workshop. This is a process in which the relationship between artist/researcher and participant/audience, maker, and witness is fluid. It extends each individual’s abilities and connects doing to learning to inquiring in a single process. The book itself is a dialogue on, and an investigation into, this practice. It fully explores the specificities of workshop practice in relation to how it engages others in arts-based research. Readers learn how workshops involve inquiry into six areas: inquiry into subjects, artistic processes, skills, self, the world, and relationships with others. In the end, this informed investigation helps practitioners to better reflect on their own approaches to arts-based inquiry and research. This, in turn, leads to a better understanding of how readers can use workshops for the maximum benefit of all participants, both individuals and groups.

Exploring key issues for the anthropology of art and art theory, this fascinating text provides the first in-depth study of community art from an anthropological perspective.The book focuses on the forty year history of Free Form Arts Trust, an arts group that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to carve out a space for community arts in Britain. Turning their back on the world of gallery art, the fine-artist founders of Free Form were determined to use their visual expertise to connect, through collaborative art projects, with the working-class people excluded by the established art world. In seeking to give the residents of poor communities a greater role in shaping their built environment, the artists' aesthetic practice would be transformed.Community Art examines this process of aesthetic transformation and its rejection of the individualized practice of the gallery artist. The Free Form story calls into question common understandings of the categories of "art," "expertise," and "community," and makes this story relevant beyond late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Britain.

This market-leading practical text helps student teachers develop their confidence, understanding and skills to effectively and authentically teach arts. With a strong balance between theory and practice, Delivering Authentic Arts Education outlines the true nature of the key learning area of arts education and its importance in the curriculum, emphasising the arts as forms of creative activity, meaning-making and expression in a cultural context. Initial chapters discuss how to recognise and build on existing artistic abilities and pedagogical skills, how to encourage children’s creativity, how to lead arts appreciation experiences, and the general principles of planning and assessment. Part 2 specifically examines the five arts areas: dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts. The final part of the text, Units of Inquiry, contains valuable sample learning activities and resources that demonstrate how to plan an effective lesson within a unit of inquiry.