Book excerpt: From FirehousePublications.com comes the elementary version of our bestselling book, The Art Student's Workbook. This elementary version was created by a 20+ year certified veteran teacher and curriculum writer for classes in drawing, painting and sculpture designed for grades three through eight. The lessons are broad and easily adjusted to accommodate different grade levels, special needs students, and material appropriate for many environments from the school classroom, or home based instruction, to a fine arts camp program. It includes nearly three years worth of lesson ideas in painting, drawing, sculpture, and clay, project samples, vocabulary, worksheets, sample tests, research paper samples, grading rubrics, sketch and note taking pages, and short creative five minute writing assignments, critiquing pages, and daily closure statements to meet district observational requirements. This book is also a helpful aid in fulfilling State and Federal accommodation requirements (504/ IEP) by providing special needs students additional documented and written material that may be taken home. Every lesson is designed to be personal and expressive fine art. There are NO "crafty" projects or "cookie-cutter" lessons where everyone has the same outcome. This book stresses a "divergent thinking processes" approach and creative problem solving, with an art therapy undertone. Most lesson suggestions may be done in different media to work within tight budgets. Anecdotal evidence from the author's guidance department indicates that students who take this course with this workbook are 50% less likely to fail standardized testing. These are real numbers that can grab the attention of your administration and Board of Education if you have the same results. These lessons combine information from core curriculum and merge it with fine art. Art is the meeting place for all subjects. When we grid-we use geometry. When we make sculptures-we use engineering. When we mix colors-we reveal information about physics. When we create illustrations for stories-we learn about literature. When we review the styles of art from da Vinci to Warhol-we teach history. Students not only come to understand the concepts, but use them, and manipulate them for deeper understanding on multiple sensory levels of thinking. This workbook is divided by multicurricula units so that this concrete connection to academic "core courses" is more easily seen. ALL projects are designed to have successful divergent results, incorporate creative problem solving, and bring relevant connections to students' lives. This book is built for student success on many levels from gifted to challenged. This in turn is helpful in fulfilling mandated accommodations so that no child is left behind. We recommend that you pair this book with the student edition of the same name. For those that teach in middle or high school, find our other title, "The Art Student's Workbook."