The Art Learning Hub

It’s been a while since my last post! This summer was such a busy one as I worked as Creative Director, preparing and teaching for our summer camp.

The camp I worked with was a 7-week Vacation Bible Summer Camp (VBS) held at a church in Bayside, NY. This year marked its third year, and we had about 150 students registered, from Pre-K through 8th grade—a pretty big camp! I took on the role of Art Program Director again this year, which meant developing the art curriculum for all grades, teaching classes, curating the student art show, and even working on stage design for the children’s musical.

This was actually the very first year we held an art show at camp, so from the very beginning of curriculum planning, I was already thinking about how to connect the lessons with the exhibition. The theme of this year’s VBS was Road Trip, and that naturally became the guiding concept for both the curriculum and the art show. I started asking myself, “What do we see, eat, or experience on a road trip?” and from there, lesson ideas just started to flow. With that in mind, I designed lessons around the cultures, artists, foods, and destinations you might encounter on a journey.

To keep everything age-appropriate, I divided the curriculum into three groups: Pre-K to Kindergarten, 1st to 5th grade, and 6th to 8th grade. Over the course of seven weeks, students explored different cultures and works of art, discovering just how closely art is connected to our daily lives. They also learned that art can inspire our thoughts, emotions, communities, and cultures, and, most importantly, they found new ways to see the world and themselves through art.

For Pre-K and Kindergarten, projects included painting their feelings about road trips, creating “pizza art,” designing travel hats, and making hermit crabs you might find at the beach. Students in 1st through 5th grade began with designing their own road trip maps to the places they wished to travel. From there, they explored public art and created sculptures, learned about mosaic art inspired by famous parks around the world, and made ocean-inspired artworks that captured the feeling of being by the sea.

As the weeks went by, all these projects came together beautifully. By the time it was ready to design the exhibition, we had a Road Trip art show filled with 150 students’ stories and creations. The exhibition itself was divided into seven sections: Road Trip Maps, Sculpture Park, Under the Sea, My Travel Hat, My Journey, Mosaic Dreams, and a Community Mural Project. I arranged the sections like a journey, so families and children could “travel” through the exhibition. Everyone had such a great time exploring it together!

I’ll share more details about how we designed the art show in my next post—stay tuned!

By TAE