Home Curriculum Visual Arts
Park Day School’s robust Visual Arts program emphasizes creative expression, technical skill, and the study of contemporary and classical artists. With two art studios and a kiln on campus, students practice drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking, architecture, and other disciplines. Throughout their time at Park Day, artists have multiple opportunities to showcase their work, including at art exhibitions and showcases. The goal of the Park Day Visual Arts program is to give students a foundation on which to build lifelong artistic exploration and expression.
Kindergarten Body Outlines
How can we use our bodies to make art? How can we show how we move and how we feel with visual art? Kindergarten students answer these questions through body outline projects. Students choose a pose and are traced on paper. We use oil pastel, liquid watercolor and collage to complete their body outlines.
2nd Grade Assemblage Art
2nd grade classes use drawing, painting, writing and collage skills to create assemblage art pieces to honor change makers for Black History Month. Students have work honoring Marsha P. Johnson, Kehinde Wiley, Malcolm X, Bessie Coleman, Simone Biles, and many more.
4th Grade Fabric Collage
Inspired by Pacita Abad, students adventure into a quilting unit incorporating math, visual art, sewing/quilting, collage, fabric dyeing, drawing and painting. They learned about artists Bisa Butler, Faith Ringgold, Christopher Meyers, and the Gee’s Bend Quilters from Alabama.
5th Grade Mixed Media
As a tribute to Diego Rivera’s political work and especially his desire to make workers visible and appreciated; each student identifies a respected person in their life. Students interview and photograph their subject. Using mixed media to decorate the photographs, students then incorporate text from their interviews.
6th Grade Self Portraits
Using the grid method, students draw realistic self-portraits and explore drawing from observation, proportion, scale, gray pencil values, thumbprinting, and the history of portraiture.
7th Grade Painting a Life
In a collaboration with Merrill Gardens Senior Living in Oakland, students put together twenty-five questions to learn about the lives of their senior partners. Students paint pieces using one of the color theories we’ve studied (monochrome, analogous, etc.) to illustrate the life experiences they’ve learned about.