Art education provides an excellent opportunity for the development of school students’ personal symbolic communication. Art education for children provides, for instance, a window into certain aspects of kids’ lives that they may not be able to express verbally.
After two years of preparations, Al-Ibdaa private schools held its first art exhibition here on April 1.
“Very young children may draw what they know, but it is said that they paint what they feel,” said Salwa Basfar the kindergarten supervisor who has been a teacher for the past 16 years.
Basfar’s implemented an art program for five-year-old students where they given a theme from which they create artistic portraits. “We want to develop the student’s creativity at this very early age,” she said. “Painting can be a cathartic experience for children that enables them to release their emotions. But, painting is also a medium that requires children to analyze, organize and synthesize their experience. In short, painting requires them to think.”
Basma Hbal, a five-year-old kindergarten student painted a colorful picture of a big heart. The teacher’s analysis of this work and how Hbal went about producing it deduced that the child had natural creative power and leadership skills
Basfar said that some of the children undergoing problems at home reflected their experiences in their paintings.
The art exhibition included works of students of all grade levels. Sixth graders presented portraits on silk with an undersea theme. Other sixth graders chose to paint the two holy sites at Makkah and Madinah in acrylics. The fourth and fifth graders were given the option to choose their themes and their material creating their art pieces.
Layla Al-Romy, Al-Ibdaa’s vice-principle, said that it wasn’t easy for the students at the beginning to create their artwork.
“Students are not used to expressing their feelings through art,” she said. “But once the teacher delivers the idea to the students, provides them with easy instructions, and makes it appealing to them, then there are no problems. Getting them to do that helps in maturing the students psychologically.”
Nada Mahmoud Shawli, a fifth and sixth grade art teacher at the school, said that stimulating students’ interest in creative expression requires hard effort.
