Children Master Tools of Creativity in Art Class

Put 5-year-old Kurston Cook in front of a lump of clay and he might make a black widow spider or a caveman. Lately he’s been making big, four-legged creatures.

His fingers deftly roll out four chubby legs, a body and a long, serpentine neck. He shapes the head and uses a wood tool to form the eyes and a gaping mouth.

Was there any special reason for the sculptures?

“Because it’s fun,” Kurston answered while finishing his brontosaurus. “Because I like dinosaurs.”

Kurston, like many other students at Pacific Oaks College and Children’s School in Pasadena, has had special art instruction since he was 2 in a program that introduces young children to clay, silk screen, painting, drawing and crafts. Karen Neubert, the school’s artist-in-residence, is the teacher.

The art skills enhance creative abilities and also help develop eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and new language and social skills, Neubert said. Art is a weekly subject in the Pacific Oaks children’s school curriculum.

The school was established in 1945 by seven Quaker families and offers educational programs for infants and children up to the age of 9. The college specializes in teacher education, and many of its teaching fellows do fieldwork in the Children’s School.

“A lot of people don’t think 2-year-olds are doing anything,” Neubert said. “But we don’t emphasize the product. They may just make their little series (of art pieces), and then it’s goodby.”

Each series of creations, Neubert said, is a basic lesson in working with clay--steps known as the coil, the ball and the slab that all clay artists use. A child like Kurston, Neubert said, who was introduced to clay when he was 2, has a better chance of achieving a certain level of mastery over the medium when he is older.

Neubert, who has been Pacific Oaks’ artist-in-residence for 11 years, has taught clay and other art skills to hundreds of young children.

Sitting across from Kurston at a recent Saturday art festival, Buffy Kwok was designing her slab of clay into a collage with feathers and sequins. Buffy, 5, used a garlic press to make spaghetti-like shapes of clay ooze onto her clay canvas.

At the other end of the table two boys fashion whimsical creatures and faces.

The goal for each child is not in the final product or technique.

“It is to enable a child to have mastery over his art materials,” Neubert said. “It gives the children a sense of control, especially when they are usually told what to do all the time.”

ReGena Booze, one of the master preschool teachers, said manual dexterity and gross motor skills are strengthened if clay skills are taught. She said this was evident when her class had a cooking project where the children had to roll out and flatten chapatis and tortillas.

“It is also nice for the kids to see a real artist,” Booze added.

In Kim Sakamoto-Steidl’s class, which includes children in grades one to three, art is meshed with science.

She often uses different art methods to depict science topics. After the recent oil spill off Alaska, many students used painting and paper sculpture to depict the dead birds, fish and other wildlife killed by the oil. The artwork covers one wall in the classroom and graphically communicates the fragility of the environment--as seen by 5- to 9-year-olds.

Pacific Oaks children’s school is not alone in teaching art skills to young children.

At the Pasadena Arts Workshop, enrollment for all preschool to kindergarten classes has doubled in the past year, said Mark Niblock, school programs director.

“Art is the perfect tool to give a child confidence. To design, create and problem-solve on their own,” he said.

Lynn Nauman, a program coordinator at Kidspace, a participatory museum in Pasadena, has also noticed an increase in children 2 to 5 attending their art and science workshops.

Sakamoto-Steidl summed up the Pacific Oaks arts program as having “no right or wrong answers.” The children, she said are “encouraged to explore and discover.”

Sometimes the children do come upon some unexpected discoveries.

James Kinard, 7, remembers when he made a clay elephant and put it in a kiln. After it was fired he returned to the kiln but couldn’t find his elephant.

“It exploded,” Kinard said. “I found out it had to have a hole in it (to allow the steam to escape), and it couldn’t be so fat.”