Get ready to enter your class in the 10th Annual U.S. Kids Cover Contest! This is your chance to win money for your school’s art program and show off the artistic abilities of your students. First place will receive $1,500 for their art program, second place $1,000, and third place $500. Choose the theme of the magazine below most appropriate for the age of your students and ask them to create a cover for the magazine. First, second, and third place winners will be chosen for each magazine.
Turtle Magazine for Preschool Kids (for artists ages 3-5)
Create a colorful piece of artwork showing us your favorite animal in the whole world.
Humpty Dumpty Magazine (for artists ages 5-7)
Create a colorful piece of artwork showing us a real or make-believe place in the world you would like to go.
Jack and Jill (for artists ages 8-12)
Create a colorful piece of artwork showing us how you think people can be environmentally “green.”
We encourage you to use any medium and paper that you would like to use to make your entries look great. Please keep paper size to 8 ½ x 11 inches.
At U.S. Kids we know the importance of art education in the lives of young people. As an art teacher, you play an integral part in the education of each of your students. Research shows that art influences children in many positive ways.
According to the National Endowment for the Arts, research strongly suggests that young people who learn about and participate in the arts acquire skills that help them in decision-making, problem solving, creative thinking, and teamwork. An increasing number of studies also find that arts programs motivate children to learn, assisting in improving performance in core academic subjects.
“The real purpose of art education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.” Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, in a Wall Street Journal editorial
10 Lessons the Arts Teach
by Elliot Eisner
1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind. Yale University Press. Used by permission from the National Art Education Association (NAEA). For more information on art education and its benefits, visit http://www.naea-reston.org/