Late last month, I loaded onto a plane from LAX, and more than 24 hours later, I arrived in beautiful Ubud, Bali to host an art studio at the 2019 Family Adventure Summit. I was so excited to study art in this foreign culture and help some of the 400+ attendees create beautiful artworks. Teaching art in Bali was, hands down, the most beautiful art trip I’ve taken this year, but that doesn’t mean everything went exactly as planned. In fact, the whole art studio experience could have been a complete disaster if I hadn’t thought on my feet and set some time aside before take off for some serious Montessori art lesson planning. Here’s how my trip went and how you can learn from my mistakes.
Our accommodations were the most luxurious museum-hotel hybrid where the check-in desk was outside. The grounds and gardens were all designed as outdoor art, with stairs, statues, water features, and plants planned out to provide a balance between man and environment. I was truly stunned at what a beautiful (albeit humid) paradise it was!
The first few days I got to explore found a traditional Batik class taught by a local artist. I have to say, this class was one of the highlights of my trip! Seeing and experiencing different painting methods and tools is one of my travel passions. I’m always on the hunt to bring back methods to my young and adult art students, and Bali is an artist’s paradise!
I also learned how friendly the Balinese people are and how wonderful their culture is. Every day, I got to experience the daily Canang sari offerings, which are prayers of peace, for balance and gratitude to different gods of Balinese Hinduism. The frangipani flowers were also everywhere, and the petals falling from the trees wherever I walked was a reminder of nature’s beauty. And the Southeast Asian sunsets could have inspired a million paintings!
While teaching on this trip, I, of course, had the opportunity to teach my young students new and different art techniques. Before my trip I did some investigating and found out that Ubud had a huge tourist attraction—a natural habitat that was home to more than 1000 rescued monkeys! I decided to work this into my Montessori art lesson planning, and created a clay activity where they would sculpt a monkey, that they could then take home with them as a souvenir.
I traveled with white air-dry clay that usually takes about 24 hours to harden; I planned two days for the activity—that should have given my students enough time to sculpt their little monkey, allow it to harden, and then paint it. I’ve taught projects like this hundreds of times and nothing has ever gone wrong…except this time!
The day of my clay workshop I showed my students basic clay forming methods, and gave each of them a portion of clay so they could begin working on their monkeys. About five minutes into the lesson, I realized that everyone’s clay was drying out fast and was quickly becoming unworkable. Hands started popping up for my help, and I realized the humidity was so high that it was drying the clay out instantly. I started to panic while helping everyone, plus I was sweating and super hot—I wasn’t used to that kind of humidity myself!
After 20 minutes of trying to remedy the situation, I decided to collect all 30 monkeys (or attempts at monkeys) that all looked the same, and placed them in plastic bins. I tried to label each project to remember whose was whose, and told the students we would finish the monkeys the next day.
After all the kids left for the day I had the brilliant idea of spraying their monkeys with water to try and rehydrate the clay, which is a sculpture trick that has usually worked a thousand times before…but again, not this time!
The next day after everyone took their seats, eager to work on their cute little monkeys, and as I passed them out to smiling faces I started hearing the kids say, “gooey” and “gross.” The water I sprayed the night before turned the clay into a gooey dough that stuck to everyone’s hands. I had ruined everyone’s projects! Some kids started crying because out of the 30 monkeys, only four survived, allowing their child to finish with their creation. I had 26 upset kids trying to scrape gooey clay off their hands and all running towards the bathroom; it was total chaos!
Why I’m sharing my art disaster?
I want you to know how to work through difficult lessons. Honestly art making is trial and error; it’s 90 percent mistakes. Artists are rarely satisfied with their work, and as an artist and art teacher, I can truly say that art making is all about experimenting. Art making builds resilience!
That’s why I always teach that the process is what’s important, not the product or outcome. I think teaching in the heat to loud kids outdoors, plus hours and hours of traveling got the best of me and I forgot my own golden rule!
I was able to avoid complete disaster by gathering the kids and fessing up to my mistake. I explained how art making is trial and error, and mistakes happen frequently for artists. I invited everyone to watch me try to sculpt a monkey step-by-step so they could see me struggle on my own through the process right in front of them. I changed my technique a few times and reminded them that there’s more than one way to do things. In the end, I created something that kind of looked like a monkey, everyone calmed down. They were inspired to go back to their gooey clay and get back to work—they even shared bits of workable clay with each other and some kids started creating other things, like bananas and trees.
Where to Start: Focus on Isolated Skills
So, where did I go wrong in all of this? First off, I gave my students perfect images of monkeys as inspiration for their work. This means I built up an expectation that they themselves would be creating and taking home an artwork representation of a perfect monkey. I should have encouraged the group to explore with the clay and brainstorm their own ideas of what a monkey looks like. Then we could have looked at the art experience as practice and a way to learn basic art skills.
Art lessons should focus on a series of isolated skills—if they result in beautiful monkeys, then that’s just a bonus! When you teach children art lessons, you need to put emphasis on the process: brainstorming, innovating, creating, and problem solving. Try to stay away from giving kids the perfect image in their head and try to focus on isolated building skills and have them reflect on the experience.
One Step Further: Download My Montessori Art Lesson Planning Guide
The only way I was able to recover those art lessons gone wrong, was because I had a solid foundation for art lesson planning. It’s taken me years to perfect it—and clearly, not everything goes “perfect”—and I’ve gotten it down to a simple three-step process. This Montessori art lesson planning guide will help you too, to easily create art experiences for your students. Download it, keep it in your desk or folder, and refer to it whenever you’re mapping out your curriculum or planning your next art activities. (Just remember, even with the best laid plans, sometimes you have to breathe and just go with the flow!)
Click here to download the guide.
Early Childhood Art Guide
Visual Arts Teaching Guide
for 13 Months – 6 Years Old
This book includes:
✅ My proprietary art teaching method
✅ The proper and complete list of art materials
✅ A guide for staging and setting up a successful art environment
✅ Tips and art lesson ideas for early childhood
✅ A convenient three-ring binder presentation
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