Story and photos by SUZIE BOSS

JUNEAU, Alaska— Daily routines are opportunities for small celebrations in the lives of young children. Mimi Walker understands this. That's why morning at Riverbend Elementary School begins with her students gathered in a circle for a weather report, a new day highlighted on the calendar, and a settling-in song that gives 23 kindergartners and first-graders a chance to practice the sounds of the alphabet while welcoming each other by name.

"We forgot some people," says a little boy in a tie-dyed T-shirt when the song ends.

"Who?" asks Walker, leaning toward him to signal that she's listening.

"Bee-baa-Beethoven!" he sings out.

Another child picks up the thread and chimes in with, "Vee -vaa-van Gogh!"

Walker smiles and gets in the game. "Anyone with a 'K'?" she prompts.

"Kay-kah-Kandinsky!" the students sing out in an unrehearsed chorus. As if on cue, they point to the back of the classroom where a poster of the Russian abstract artist's work hangs above a giant penmanship sample of a letter "K."

For these students, learning about famous artists and musicians is as basic as learning the ABCs. Nurturing creative children is what Walker attempts to do every day, in small moments of wonder and delight. In her multiage classroom, she weaves lessons about the arts throughout the day and across the curriculum. It's a journey of discovery for students and teacher alike.

When she was a towheaded girl, growing up in the shadow of Juneau's mountain peaks, Mimi Walker always had a sketchpad in hand. "I wanted to be an artist," recalls the now 45-year-old teacher. "I drew all the time." Her artistic inclination came naturally, fed by family and environment. Her mother directed community theater productions and served on the state arts council. Her sister had a passion for music (and would grow up to be an elementary music teacher in Juneau). In southeastern Alaska, a land carved by glaciers and blanketed by forests, carvings and murals adorn public buildings and grace private spaces. According to Bill Reid, a Haida artist whose words enlighten visitors to the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, "The people of the Northwest Coast … centered their society around what was to them the essence of life: what we now call 'Art.'"

By the time she graduated from Montana State University with a degree in art, a minor in history, and a secondary teaching credential, Walker hoped to center her life around art, too, as a high school teacher. But back home in Juneau, she found slim pickings for even the most passionate arts specialists. "There was one opening in 10 years," she relates with a sigh. She earned an elementary endorsement and, nine years ago, began teaching in the primary grades-not as an arts specialist, but as an ordinary classroom teacher. Well, maybe not so ordinary.

Far from being disappointed with the career change, Walker was right at home in the world of the young child where learning takes place by exploring with eyes and ears and hands, the basic toolkit of the artist. With a smile of satisfaction, she confides, "I've found a way to teach art every day."

As her students settle into the rhythms of the day, Walker offers a hint about today's lesson plan. "I'm going to introduce you to a brand-new artist," she tells the class. But first, she sets the stage by reminding students what they've been learning about their senses.

With the children sitting cross-legged in a circle around her, she reads a book called Lucy's Picture. In the story,

a little girl uses feathers and fur and other tactile objects to create her unusual "picture" for her grandfather. Walker asks the group, "What is it she's adding? What do these things give her picture?"

"Texture," suggests a first-grader named Rebekah, earning a quick but energetic nod of agreement from the teacher.

As the story continues, the children begin to realize that Lucy's grandfather is blind. Then their questions come quickly (and questions are always welcome in this circle of learning). "How does he get into bed?" "How does he write?" "Can he speak and hear?" "Why does he have a dog?" Each query offers a new chance for discussion about sight and the other senses, discussion that naturally fosters language development.

In earlier lessons in this unit, the children have explored the senses at literacy stations, with hands-on activities designed to engage them in independent and small-group learning. They've also learned about the life and work of Beethoven, the great composer who lost his hearing. A huge, colorful portrait of Beethoven hangs just outside the classroom door, created by the whole class as a cooperative mural project. Children's comments about the composer have been typed up and posted around the edges of the mural, including this remark by a first-grader: "He wasn't able to hear when he was composing. He heard the music in his mind."

With Walker as choreographer, the class segues from one activity to the next. Today, for instance, she exits storytime by inviting the children onto their feet to join her in a song. The "song" is Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," and they "sing" in sign language. Then, as she directs them to their journals and book boxes for independent work on reading and writing, she plays a recording of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." She invites them to compare this piece with the symphonies they've heard, gently guiding them to draw parallels and notice differences. A little boy stops in his tracks to listen. "It's mellower," he says, then makes his way to a table, eager to write in his journal.

When she tries to articulate the lessons that the arts offer her students, Walker finds herself momentarily at a loss for words. "It's huge," she says, gesturing around her classroom at all the evidence. A big picture window, frosty around the edges on this chilly winter morning, is dotted with tissue-paper stars that resemble stained glass. Children's drawings made in the style of van Gogh line one wall, next to reproductions of the Dutch master's swirling yellow sunflowers and wavy blue irises. On the next wall, beside the letters of the alphabet, examples of Matisse's bold, contrasting shapes hang next to a graph the children made, involving pumpkin seeds. Overhead, a Chinese dragon kite runs the length of the room while a school of paper salmon, made from real fish using a printmaking technique that shows details of fins and scales, appears to swim toward the doorway. Animal masks the class made to enact a legend hang above a bulletin board, watching over this busy scene that delights the senses.

"Art is a way of communicating that involves history, expression, and creativity," Walker says, summarizing the philosophy that guides her teaching style. "In life, it's the creative person who stands out. That's the adult I'd want to hire or get to know." Teaching through art, she believes, "allows children to be creative every day."

Rather than teaching drawing or music as subjects separate from the rest of learning, Walker weaves all of the arts throughout her lesson plans. She uses broad themes to teach the concepts and critically important skills of the primary grades, and finds support for her methods at the local and state levels. The Juneau school district takes a whole-language approach to literacy and endorses such practices as project-based education, student-centered classrooms, and an integrated curriculum. Alaska's content standards for the arts affirm that "the study of the arts is essential to a basic education …. Most of all, the arts ask children to develop their own responses to questions." Walker's classroom practices inspire children to ask questions, seek answers, create meaning for themselves.

A three-week unit on bears, for instance, started with an Iroquois legend, "The Boy Who Lived with Bears." She told it to the children; then-in the traditional way that legends are passed along-they told it back to her. Making the language their own, they rewrote it into a play and illustrated their script. Each child chose an animal to portray. Children too shy to speak their lines aloud became musicians, selecting percussion instruments to "announce" the various animals on stage. They researched real bears-the stars of the story and animals native to Alaska. A biologist visited the class, bringing bear skins and bear skulls for the children to touch and feel. They used their math skills to count, measure, and graph bear teeth. They baked bear paw pastries, complete with the anatomically correct number of almond "claws." They sang bear songs and danced an Indian circle dance. They made pottery bears. They interviewed family members to gather real-life bear stories. Finally, they put on the play for their parents, wearing animal masks they made by placing plaster casts directly on their faces. When the arts are used to expand learning, Walker says,

"It spirals into a huge picture."

Today, when the children return from recess, Walker is finally ready to introduce them to the "brand-new artist." She unfurls an enlarged self-portrait of Henri Matisse, with black-and-white lines suggesting a curious countenance. A little boy ventures a guess: "Picasso?" "No, but we'll get to him in a couple weeks," she promises. "Is he an Impressionist?" asks another, intuitively seeking to put this new artist into context. For the next half hour, Walker leads a lively conversation about the life and work of the French painter. She begins with some storytelling, helping the children get acquainted with the man behind the art. She guides them to France on the world map. She writes the years of his birth and death on the chalkboard (numbers she'll use again later, in math lessons), and points out that Matisse lived later than the Impressionists they have already studied. She tells them how Matisse studied to become a lawyer, but took up painting to help pass the time during a long illness. "He found out that he loved making art more than being a lawyer, so he went to art school. This made his family unhappy, because they had been so proud that he was a lawyer," she explains.

Drawing on her training in discipline-based art education, Walker helps her students understand the elements of art that make Matisse's work distinctive and of lasting importance. Gesturing to reproductions of his vibrant paintings, she points out his use of color. She helps the children see why his paintings look "flat." Keeping the concepts at the children's level, she uses one of her own student's drawings to show what she means by "perspective." Then, tying the lesson into the unit on senses, she explains how, late in life, Matisse's eyesight began to fail him. "But he found a way to keep making art," she adds.

With that, Walker shifts to a hands-on project: making cutouts in the style of Matisse in his later years, when his vision was weak but his passion for art remained strong. Before she turns students loose with paper, glue, and scissors, however, she engages them in a discussion of the elements that work best in such projects. One by one, children step up to point out examples of contrast, repeating shapes, repeating colors, positive and negative space, abstract designs, background, foreground. They exhibit an understanding of artistic concepts that makes today's parent helper-an experienced art teacher herself-gasp in amazement. ("I've never seen such high-level thinking from such young children," she says.) Finally, Walker shows the children other cut-outs, done by previous classes, and invites them to give "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to what they see. As young as five and six, these children are developing their own aesthetic sense of what moves them, what leaves them cold, and why.

When Walker selects a theme or an artist for class study, "I choose ones I feel a passion for," she says. She also looks for subjects that will give her diverse class opportunities to appreciate what makes each person special and distinctive.

Nearly half of this year's 23 students are ethnic or racial minorities, including children whose heritage is Tlingit, Eskimo, Hispanic, Chinese, African American, Filipino. Two children receive assistance for social and emotional concerns. Two others are in special education programs. Two speak English as a second language. Two have been identified as gifted. "The more you know about other cultures, other people," Walker says, "the more accepting you are. We learn that differences are wonderful."

She includes a unit on Tlingit art and culture, for example, to give all her students a better sense of the place where they live and her Native children a chance to share their heritage. One little boy took special delight in studying birds because his family is part of the Raven clan. Talking about abstract art earlier this year is what led the class to a discussion of Kandinsky's work (and a child's astute insight that "realism looks the same to everyone, but abstract art can be different to everybody"), and a celebration of one little girl's Russian roots.

Sometimes, Walker has to wait for her own creativity to breathe a project to life. For years, she had been wishing for a way to introduce her students to the American artist Mary Cassatt, famous for her paintings of mothers and children. "But how would I do her justice?" was the question she couldn't answer. Then, in a workshop, while watching a film about an innovative early education program in the northern Italian town of Reggio Emilia, she found herself nearly bursting with excitement. She saw a way to adapt a teaching technique invented in Italy and introduce it to her children living here, on the uppermost edge of North America.

The result of that inspiration is a Mother's Day project Walker now looks forward to doing each spring. Onto a clear easel, lit from behind, she projects a slide of one of Cassatt's paintings. The children trace the outlines of mother and child, capturing the artist's balanced composition. Then, they draw the details of facial features in their own family's image.

Flipping through a collection of these unique mother-child drawings, done in rich oil pastels and alive with originality, Walker beams with pride. "The drawings are childlike, but they have Cassatt's softness. They capture a relationship, what's special about how the children see themselves and their mothers."

Creativity is what excites Walker, what makes teaching new each year, each day. "You can't get this stuff out of a textbook," she says. "It comes from within, from the teacher's creative side."

Weaving the arts into her primary classroom has its drawbacks. "It is messy," she admits, "and it takes time, and you need materials." She has a classroom budget and parents make donations, but she spends as much as $4,000 a year out of her own pocket to purchase additional supplies. Every closet in her classroom is jammed with project boxes, labeled according to unit topic. "I'm the last one out of the building every summer, packing up my stuff," she admits.

But she wouldn't have it any other way. "This is the way I have to teach," she says.

At the day's end, Walker grows silent for a heartbeat after her children make their noisy exit. But then her eyes wander across the room to a computer. She offers to show a visitor the multimedia project her first-graders did last year. They used a computer program called HyperStudio … conducted independent research on the birds of Alaska … made bird sculptures to scale … generated maps color-coded by seasons …. "Just wait until you see what they created," she says, and she's off and running, celebrating the moment.

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