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Friday afternoons from Oct. 14 to Nov. 11, around 80 children, ranging in ages from 4 to 12, are brought into Carnegie Hall to have fun with all genres of art. This program, called ArtWorks, has been in place for around 20 years.
The children, for the most part, come from area schools, which look at the program as an extra art class for their students. This includes a group of 24 students who come from Indian Island School by bus. In past years, ArtWorks has included high school students, but in recent years, the focus has shifted to elementary and middle school students.
Activities in previous years have involved the children creating claymation movies, in which they create their own story lines, make clay figures, design the sets, work the camera and even choose their own music. Other groups have written poems about rain, made instruments that sound like the rain, worked on large murals and learned about cave paintings. One of the favorite projects this semester has been the creation of the students’ own superheroes.
ArtWorks offers excellent learning opportunities for not only the children, but also University of Maine art education majors who do the actual teaching. This is one of their requirements before they can become student teachers, and take this opportunity to develop teaching skills in a real-life environment seriously.
Art professor Constant Albertson has directed this program for the past five years. She said that the art education students use ArtWorks as “a practice run for the big-time, which is student teaching.”
The art education students are responsible for everything from ordering supplies for their lessons to making their own lesson plans.
Elizabeth Maloney-Hawkins is an art education major who is teaching children ages 7 to 9. She sees this as an extremely valuable learning experience for herself as well as her peers involved in the program.
“We can be lectured and lectured and lectured, but not really understand the whole process of teaching until we actually experience it first hand,” said Maloney-Hawkins.
The art education students’ goals are to make the classroom experience as genuine as possible so that they, as well as their students, get the most out of their 90 minutes together.
Arlene Sylvester, of Old Town, has enrolled her 7-year-old granddaughter in the program for the second time in as many semesters. Sylvester said her granddaughter’s favorite activity so far was when they “made footprints.” She added that her granddaughter raved about that project for days. They are already making plans to participate in ArtWorks again.
“She is insistent that she wants to do it for as long as she can do it, and I don’t plan on trying to stop her,” Sylvester said, chuckling.
The children have always enjoyed the ArtWorks program, and that is what has kept it so popular over the past 20 years.
Maloney-Hawkins said the reason children enjoy the experience so much is “because it’s art.”
“Who’s not going to love it?” she said.
