Thinking with a Line, CD-ROM, and Teacher's Guide to the Interactive CD-ROM.

Thinking with a Line, CD-ROM, and Teacher's Guide to the Interactive CD-ROM. Cathy Topal. Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, 2005. 82 pp., $44.95.

For many elementary art teachers, teaching early childhood students, especially kindergarten, is their greatest challenge; it's certainly true for me. Thinking with a Line (TWAL), a just released interactive CD-ROM and companion teacher's guide, should definitely be in the hands of every single elementary art teacher, as it offers one of the most excellent programs I have encountered for early childhood students.

Inspired by the principles of the Reggio Emilia approach to education, the program focuses on the concept of line. Through experiences using line printing, young students explore spatial relationships, multiple ways to solve problems, geometric thinking, and even the structure of the alphabet. All of this is accomplished as students learn to print with the edge of a small piece of cardboard, using basic materials every art teacher has available--primarily cardboard, paper, and tempera paint.

Why only line, you might ask? Line is the most basic of the art elements. Identifying and creating vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and other kinds of lines helps students see and understand how shapes, letters, designs, and buildings are constructed. The simplicity of printing with lines helps students form constructions or words they might not yet be able to draw or write.

By learning to print with a piece of cardboard, students discover that they can construct a variety of lines and shapes and combine them to create complex structures such as letters, buildings, machines, and vehicles. They also begin to create structures found in nature such as snowflakes, skeletons, and the branching patterns of trees.

Thinking with a Line consists of an interactive computer program on a CD-ROM and a corresponding teacher's guide. The CD-ROM includes short video clips that highlight key moments of teaching and learning. The teacher's guide contains twelve corresponding chapters and comprehensive lessons, each of which includes learning objectives, motivating strategies, key questions to promote thinking, sequential activities, a list of related children's books, and more. At the end of the book, correlations are provided between specific lessons and the national standards for the visual arts, mathematics, science, and English language arts. I highly recommend TWAL--I can't wait to use it with my students!