Monday, October 30, 2017

The New Zealand Art Activity Book



The New Zealand Art Activity Book – new edition
By Helen Lloyd
Published by Te Papa Press
ISBN: 978-0-9941362-3-7
160 pages, paperback, $29.99

 
Te Papa Press has launched a new art activity book that promises to boost children’s creativity while giving them a gentle art history lesson.

 Following on from the considerable success of the first New Zealand Art Activity Book, art educator Helen Lloyd has produced a substantially revised new edition that introduces children to more than 50 significant historical and contemporary works from the country’s national collection at Te Papa.

The Te Papa pieces sit alongside page works specially commissioned from 15 contemporary New Zealand artists and a range of fun art activities designed to encourage children to learn a variety of different creative processes, in the school or at home.

“All teachers understand that hands-on art activities play a central role in children’s learning and development,” says Helen. “But I’m aware that time for art in the classroom can sometimes feel squeezed by core subjects like literacy and numeracy, and primary teachers often have limited training about how to teach art. Therefore books like this are a valuable resource that can be used at home or in school to develop children’s creativity.”

With the assistance of Te Papa’s Senior Curator Art, Sarah Farrar, Helen has selected artworks that will allow children to explore both historic and contemporary art, art made with a variety of different materials and techniques, and by Māori, Pākehā, Pacific and New Zealand Asian artists, some familiar and others lesser known.

In addition to the English text, Māori and Pacific phrases are used throughout the new edition, helping children to expand their language skills while they learn about New Zealand artists and explore different ways to create art.

The book’s hands-on creative activities are designed so that children can experiment with similar ideas or techniques to those used in the featured artworks. “By answering the questions I’ve posed about each of the artworks, children will be encouraged to look really closely, develop their visual literacy skills and think about what art means,” Helen Lloyd says.

‘Unlike other generic art activity books, this one gives you (and your child) something worth its weight in gold: a concise visual history of Māori made art, modernist and post-modernist art of Aotearoa, New Zealand,’ said the Waikato Times of the first edition. The new edition delivers the same outcome.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Helen Lloyd is a Gallery Educator at City Gallery Wellington. She is a qualified art
teacher with a visual art and art history degree and a Master’s in museum and
gallery education. Helen has 20 years’ experience of teaching art to children of
all ages in schools, museums and galleries in the United Kingdom, Russia and
New Zealand, including Te Papa, where she held the position of Senior Education
Programmer. She also authored the first New Zealand Art Activity Book and has
written and developed the new edition in consultation with Sarah Farrar, Senior
Curator Art at Te Papa.

No comments: