Elementary/Early ChildhoodProducts

The Mindful Studio

By Jane E. Dalton

Bring mindfulness and expressive arts practices to the classroom. Discover a plethora of tools to use with students in this book that introduces mindfulness-based arts practices to teachers. You’ll find centering exercises to begin creative endeavors, visual arts lessons, reflection questions, and lesson extensions to explore mindfulness in a variety of art modalities. Enhance students’ creative process, help them be more engaged and focused on the task at hand, and encourage them to be open to their emotional life.

Artmaking, Play, and Meaning Making

By Sydney Walker

This new title in the Art Education in Practice Series explores the use of play as a method for provoking new ways of thinking. Play is often considered in terms of young children or as a diversion for older students, author Sydney Walker invites us to consider play as a productive agent that works to evoke diverse thought and challenges students to move beyond traditional artmaking.

SchoolArts Collection: Early Childhood

By SchoolArts magazine

Discover diverse lessons based on theoretic foundations commonly used in Early Childhood programs, such as the Reggio Emilia approach and Choice-based or Play-based Art Education. Developed and taught by art teachers from around the country, these lessons reflect child-centered approaches to art education for the youngest students. With this title, you’ll enjoy lessons that illustrate an exploratory approach to encountering artist’s tools, materials, and ways of working with an emphasis on discovery and creativity.

SchoolArts Collection: STEAM

By SchoolArts magazine

Guide student inquiry and build critical thinking skills with STEAM—the meaningful integration of science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. The second title in our SchoolArts Collection will showcase our favorite STEAM lessons created by experienced art teachers for SchoolArts magazine. Students participate in engaging experiences to develop 21st-century skills such as creativity and imagination, critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration. 139 pages, softcover

Adaptive Art: Deconstructing Disability in the Art Classroom

By Bette Naughton

A collection of tools and strategies to help art educators create adaptations for students with disabilities by capitalizing on their abilities. This practical resource will enable educators to engage all students in a meaningful creative process of self-expression. Discover a variety of instructional methods to adapt art activities, media, tools, and techniques to meet the needs of students with a wide range of challenges. 146 pages, softcover

Check out the webinar on Adaptive Art with author Bette Naughton.

Race and Art Education

By Amelia M. Kraehe & Joni B. Acuff

This title in the Art Education in Practice Series addresses issues of race in an accessible style with a focus on classroom practice. This book aims to provide a well-informed introduction to essential concepts, vocabularies, strategies, and methods for engaging race and racialized human differences in a constructive, equity-oriented manner.

Therapeutic Approaches in Art Education

By Lisa Kay

Working with students who have experienced adversity and trauma can be challenging. Therapeutic Approaches in Art Education is a practical guide for those who wish to support therapeutic art making in their practice. Discover trauma-informed approaches that can be applied to a typical classroom setting—urban, rural, or suburban—and address marginalized populations. While you will not become an art therapist, this book will help you gain a better understanding of art therapy and how to support your students in thoughtful, holistic ways. 186 pages, softcover

Rules for Making Artists Poster

By Melissa Purtee

In her new book, Making Artists, co-authored with Ian Sands, Melissa Purtee lays out her method for teaching students with a range of abilities how to work as independent artists. Created as a companion to that book, this poster is the perfect piece to adorn your walls and show your students that art opens a world of opportunity for them!

Beautiful Stuff: Learning with Found Materials

By Cathy Weisman Topal and Lella Gandini

Inspired by educational practices used in the Reggio Emilia approach to Early Childhood education, this book focuses on process rather than product. Chapters cover concepts important to building strong foundations for your learners. Enjoy topics such as collecting and organizing materials, stimulating thoughts about design, reflecting upon and extending work, and more. Several sorting and categorizing activities are presented, along with individual and group projects and constructions. ISBN: 978-08719-2388-2, 105 pages, softcover, grades PreK–2

Beautiful Stuff from Nature: More Learning with Found Materials

Edited by Cathy Weisman Topal and Lella Gandini

Beautiful Stuff from Nature illustrates unique stories from teachers across North America who were challenged to explore their outdoor spaces with children to see where their interests lead. In these pages, you’ll encounter ordinary experiences made extraordinary through the teacher’s documentation. Discover ideas for using natural materials to enrich learning in classrooms from Early Childhood to elementary. Engage your students as they build on understandings from initial explorations. ISBN: 978-16152-8678-2, 127 pages, softcover, grades PreK–5

The Hundred Languages in Ministories: Told by Teachers and Children from Reggio Emilia

Forward by Carla Rinaldi. Introduction by Amelia Gambetti and Lella Gandini. Translated by Lella Gandini and Leslie Morrow.

In The Hundred Languages in Ministories, we can finally observe the timeless, extraordinary stories first seen in the Italian edition of The Hundred Languages of Children, as Loris Malaguzzi originally intended.

These ministories offer messages of a positive culture of childhood. Educators can observe how an interactive education prepares children to become active participants in their learning in the 21st century. We can also observe the attentiveness and competency of teachers as they construct meaningful experiences with the children. Children are the inquirers, supported by the teachers with time, space and many engaging materials. ISBN: 978-16152-8404-7, 102 pages, softcover, grades PreK–5

Children and Painting

By Cathy Weisman Topal

Various strategies are presented for teaching the basic painting concepts and techniques, from an elements and principles orientation to thematic approaches. This valuable teachers tool overcomes your difficulties in exposing children to the wonders of painting. ISBN: 978-08719-2241-0, 168 pages, hardcover, grades PreK–5

Documenting Children’s Meaning

By Jason Avery, Karyn Callaghan, and Carol Anne Wien. Forward by Lella Gandini.

The amazing and complex work of children’s minds is made visible in this groundbreaking new book from Together for Families in Hamilton, Ontario. Inspired by the world-renowned Infant/Toddler and Preschool centers of Reggio Emilia, Italy, artist Jason Avery and his colleagues use photography, recording of children’s words and drawings, and reflective commentary to document the investigations and emergent concepts taking place in this urban drop-in center serving children and families from infancy onward. ISBN: 978-16152-8427-6, 190 pages, softcover, grades PreK–5

Insights and Inspirations from Reggio Emilia - Elementary

Edited by Lella Gandini, Susan Etheredge, and Lynn Hill

Insights and Inspirations from Reggio Emilia captures and celebrates 30 years of the Reggio Emilia innovative presence and inspiration in North American early childhood educational thought and practice.

It is a narrative in word and image, representing the voices of teachers, scholars, and policy makers whose professional philosophies and practices have been changed by their encounters with the philosophy and practices of Reggio.

These signs of gratitude honor first and foremost the legacy of Loris Malaguzzi, who developed and constructed with collaborators and teachers what is now known around the world as the Reggio Emilia approach.

These signs honor as well his colleagues who are continuing to develop his philosophy using novel avenues fully in harmony with his dynamic view of exploring new ways and new sources of learning and relationship. ISBN: 978-08719-2894-8, 224 pages, softcover, grades PreK–5

Thinking with a Line

By Cathy Weisman Topal

Explore all the lessons and content from Thinking with a Line online! This print title has been converted to ThinkingWithALine.com.

Inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach and by the work of Friedrich Froebel, these activities offer strategies for teaching basic printmaking. Teachers and students of all ages delight in discovering that with simple tools like cardboard and paint they can print a multitude of linear structures from shapes and alphabets, to patterns and designs, buildings and architecture, machines, and more… This method provides an effective and developmentally appropriate approach for increasing visual learning, motor skills, language development, and critical thinking using the basic art element, line. Grades PreK–6

Teaching Children to Draw

By Marjorie and Brent Wilson

Teaching Children to Draw, Marjorie and Brent Wilson’s classic guide for teachers and parents, has been expanded and updated. The new version details the artworks children make as three types:

1. Drawing on their own—where their drawings are influenced by other children and popular visual culture,
2. Teacher-initiated playful and game-like drawing activities,
3. Adults and children drawing together to create new visual worlds.

This book suggests what adults can do and say to help children go beyond where they would on their own including:

• Expanding their graphic development in playful ways.
• Self-discovery through the use of narrative drawings about themselves, their worlds, and thinking creatively about their futures.
• Observation of how the three types of drawing influence each other.

ISBN: 978-16152-8005-6, 186 pages, softcover, grades K–8