Hands-on creativity leads to genuine art appreciation.
The Green Vale experience is punctuated by frequent and intimate interactions with the arts. The emphasis on cultivating arts appreciation, imagination and visual literacy is unusual at this level of education.
Providing an excellent intellectual counterbalance to other coursework where right and wrong answers do exist, Green Vale’s art projects encourage open-ended outcomes, allowing for individual student interpretations, perspectives and differentiation. A casualty of the digital era is a deterioration of children’s visualization skills across the board. Green Vale’s arts program works to counteract these degenerative effects.
We approach art as an exercise in critical thinking and problem solving. Every project presents an opportunity to marvel at different approaches to the same challenge. Held in two large studios filled with natural light, art classes at Green Vale emphasize the "making" of art with creative expression.
The curriculum is broad-based: students are exposed to a wide array of two and three-dimensional mediums and techniques. As students progress to the older grades, they remain engaged as unexpected concepts and materials are introduced. As an example, seventh graders are challenged to use a sewing machine to complete stuffed “Day of the Dead Skulls” in conjunction with a Spanish lesson. Lessons on architecture, product design and related forms ask students to notice art in everyday life.
Particularly inspired artists may elect to participate in Art Knights, an optional after-school enrichment program for 3rd-5th Grades.
Crafts
In a well equipped woodworking studio, students in 2nd through 8th Grades acquire the skills needed to design and build projects from jigsaw puzzles to model sailboats. They strengthen fine motor and spatial skills through the supervised use of appropriate tools. While expressing creativity, this handiwork also reinforces math and science concepts such as measurement, proportion, and physics principles. One of the most beloved and long-standing Green Vale traditions is the making of wooden sailboats in 5th Grade - and putting them to the test on the open water in a spirited race day.
Field Trips
Green Vale’s proximity to New York City, The Nassau County Museum of Art, andThe Long Island Museum of American Art, History, and Carriages allows us to incorporate full and partial-day field trips into our art curriculum. The 3rd Grade visits the American wing at The Metropolitan Museum, the 5th Grade visits the Egyptian wing, and the 6th Grade visits the Greco-Roman antiquities. Additionally, the 6th Grade visits The Cloisters in Upper Manhattan. The 8th Grade spends a wide-eyed day at the Museum of Modern Art.
The art faculty collaborates with classroom teachers to enrich the curricular study of specific topics with visual arts related to that subject. In addition, art projects are always contextualized according to a period, movement, artist, or culture.
| Humanities Unit | Art Complement | Media |
The Renaissance | one-point perspective drawing | charcoal |
| Ancient Egypt | canopic burial jars | klin-fired clay, glaze |