Teacher Training

Arts Central has completed the first year of an exciting new pilot project at Lynch Elementary School in Redmond in partnership with renowned arts educator Annie Painter. Last winter and spring, Annie Painter taught all 18 teachers at the K-5 school and all their students, a variety of art lessons, techniques and best practices for use in the classroom.

The project continues to be a way  for teachers to develop skills in integrating visual art, language literacy and content skills so they can bring art into their curriculum on an on-going basis.
 
As a component of the partnership, Arts Central teaching artists, Paula Bullwinkel and Karen Williams joined Annie to practice  techniques and strategies for their own professional development alongside the teachers at Lynch E.S.
 

Year 1- A Few Highlights:

Lynch Color & Design Project: Food with a Mood

The year's work involved a few design elements and principles such as color mixing for mood, repetiton, line to create shapes, positive shape and negative space and symmetry in some pieces, all in support of the state art standards and best practices for children.

This artwork called Food with a Mood required students K-adult, to observe and draw a real or photographed cross section of a fruit or vegetable, invent a pattern for the fantastic plate and color mix using cyan, magenta and yellow paint 'chips' moistened with water to release paint. We made paint chips using tempera on white sulfite paper.

The photo above shows Annie holding a mirror for a student trying on a folk art inspired headdress.  Below to the right of Food with a Mood is an observation drawing of a fresh flower and wall panels inspired by traditional folk art worldwide.

About Annie Painter
Annie Painter is a former award winning Oregon elementary principal with experience as an elementary classroom teacher (kindergarten and grade six), exhibiting soft sculptor, curriculum specialist, middle and high school fine arts teacher. She spent three years as a national arts and literacy coach. Annie continues consulting and teaching from her studio. She and her husband, Bob Bridgeford, a former museum director and two handsome Vizsla dogs, Theo and Alexander, live on twelve acres in the tiny town of Sisters, in the Central Oregon desert.

In her studio on the property, she writes teacher materials, develops unique programs in the arts for schools and operates an educational business. She is the author of two books, Struggling Artist Masterpiece and Vincent and Jake Learn Color Mixing.

Her art and education methods and lessons are tested in school residencies and taught at the graduate university level. An estimated fifteen hundred teachers and artists who teach have enjoyed her courses and workshops in the last decade. Children's Summer Art Institutes continue in Gresham Oregon, led by her colleague, Larry Verdoorn who, with Debi Briggs-Crispin, teach with Annie through Portland State University. These programs were influenced by the Art Institute work she founded twenty years ago in the Gresham-Barlow School District where she was an elementary principal.

Annie continues national consulting as well as driving all over the state in a jeep filled with books, boxes, bags, cameras, and equipment for her many workshops and residencies with administrators, artists and organizations, parents, children and teachers.