Visual Arts
Visual art classes at Cleveland are taught by Ms. Rachel-Anne Palacios, an experienced artist and educator -- and a Cleveland parent!
Ms. Rachel-Anne's culturally-responsive curriculum focuses on art skills, multi-cultural histories, and respect for indigenous craft traditions.
Ms. Rachel-Anne teaching a distance learning class
Art project for Native American Heritage Month
Why Arts Learning?
Art fosters imagination, creativity and innovation
Art helps children envision, form new ideas, and develop new ways of seeing and thinking. Art taps the ingenuity that is innate in every child. Art helps children recognize new approaches, grasp abstraction and visualize possibilities.
Art offers multiple entry points into the learning process
By engaging all the senses, art provides children opportunities to take in information in new ways. Because of this, art activities often reach children who are otherwise not fully participating or struggling in school.
Art builds problem solving-skills
Art teaches children that there are multiple approaches to any dilemma or task. When a child decides whether to make a line thicker or thinner, whether to paint a canvas green or orange, or how to attach a piece of wire to wood, she or he is independently developing a solution. At the same time, art demonstrates that various approaches will yield various results, although often no one result is "better," just different.
Art bridges differences
During art, each child expresses his or her own way of seeing and thinking. Art provides countless opportunities for children to share these unique visions, at the same time encouraging peers to accept ideas and experiences that are different than their own. As well, art provides children with opportunities to explore and understand a variety of cultural traditions.
Art encourages flexible thinking
Art provides a safe place, free from judgment, for children to experiment and explore. Children open up and try new things once they see there are no "right" or "wrong" answers in art.
Art helps children express a range of ideas and emotions
Putting words to feelings can be difficult, even for adults. Art provides children an intuitive outlet to convey thoughts and emotions that they may not be able to articulate any other way. Color, shape, structure, texture and style are powerful communicative tools, and art-making creates a safe and nurturing environment in which to use them.
Cleveland's Parent Teacher Association (PTA) raises all the funds for instruction and supplies for Visual Arts Programs.