Art partners at the museum.

I began teaching art at a private school on Long Island, NY. My colleague, Evelyn Kandel, and I planned a joint field trip of my first graders and her ninth graders to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The museum was offering an age-appropriate exhibition on Claes Oldenburg and the museum's architecture itself (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) was relevant to our curricula.

We learned that the Guggenheim Museum's professionally guided tour was too expensive for our budget, but that we could afford the much more modest fee for a self-guided tour. How then would we best design it? We decided that the tour would have three key elements:

* Student participation through guided activities.

* A visit to view works ahead of time so that we could plan the activities.

* Partnerships of younger and older students to help them connect with each other through art.

Preparation

We visited the exhibition twice to take notes and draw up a map, noting the location of each of fourteen selected pieces. The museum would allow us one hour for our self-guided tour, so time was a factor in our planning. We decided we needed a wide range of activities. We used the Guggenheim's "family activity brochure" as a starting point but created our own activities designed to engage the students in writing, drawing, and discussion.

Art Partner Greeting Cards 

The partnerships presented unique planning challenges. Because of relative class sizes, each first grader was paired with two ninth graders. To introduce the partners, we asked the first grade teachers to help their students design and write greeting cards for their partners. Each card contained a photo and a few questions. The cards were delivered to the ninth graders who then responded with their own cards.

Field Trip

On the day of the field trip the ninth graders met their first grade partners. The ninth graders had the responsibility of guiding their partners through the museum along with completing the required activity packet. Maturity and a sense of stewardship were expected from the older students.

Each ninth grader was given the prepared activity packets, along with zip-lock bags containing pencils, erasers, markers, and crayons. As we escorted our student groups, we stopped at specific works where the teachers made brief presentations and the students discussed activity questions. Each set of partners then completed an activity in their packet.

Both grade levels were impressed with each other's knowledge about Oldenburg's work. At the end of the tour, we photographed the partners together in front of the museum.

Post Visit

Evelyn and I decided that an art exhibition of reflective works was an appropriate follow-up to our trip. The works were installed in a small exhibition space and parents were invited to join us for a reception. As I escorted my first graders, we saw the ninth graders congregating outside of the exhibition area. Many of the first graders ran towards their partners who gave them huge hugs in greeting. The special bond between students was reignited as the first graders introduced their partners to their parents. The art exhibition was a wonderful culminating event to see.

Since then, this effort has become an annual event. To this day, when we gather all of the students together for school-wide events, I frequently hear a first grader call out in delight: "Look, there's my partner!"

Doris Benter is Visual Arts Department head at Portledge School on Long Island, New York. [e-mail]