Getting Kids Interested in Art

My cousin was once an art teacher. She lived in Montreal and would bring a group of students to New  York City once a year to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She told me about friends of hers who were trying to get their kids interested in art. They would bring their kids to the museum once a week and look at one  piece of art and then leave.

Consider this picture book, THE IRIDESCENCE OF BIRDS: a Book About Henri Matisse by Patricia MacLachlan like a visit to a museum.  It is written in second person, like in this sample:

"If you were a boy named Henri Matisse who lived in a dreary town in northern France...And you wanted color and light And sun,..."

Henri Matisse is a well-known artist. If a parent or teacher wanted to show children a work of art by Matisse, they could go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, like my cousin did.

TAKE A TRIP TO ANCIENT CHINA

AT HOME IN HER TOMB: Lady Dai and the Ancient Chinese Treasures of Mawangdui by Christine Liu-Perkins. Great adventures awaited the workers who uncovered the tomb of an ancient Chinese noblewoman named Lady Dai. In addition to finding treasures they uncovered a huge black coffin. Inside that coffin there was another one. They didn’t find the occupant until they reached the fourth coffin.

To their surprise, a stench greeted them when they cut a hole in the silk cloth that surrounded the body.

SAMPLE: “The experts were baffled. If the body had decomposed more than two thousand years ago, how could it still smell so disgusting?”

Join the scientists on their journey to uncover the contents of  Lady Dai’s tomb. What was her last meal? What artifacts accompanied her on her final journey?

Readers can visit the web site of the Hunan Provincial Museum, the home of these archaeological treasures.

Teachers can find a guide to use with their students.

This is a useful book for classroom projects on China.