Washington DC Through Art

by Albatina Smith
Jumpin' With Cindy
Essay Winner

The children I was caring for were ages 5 and 2 and they both loved to do arts and craft activities. They also loved going to the many museums in the Washington DC area. But their favorite museum was the National Art Gallery.

So that gave me an idea... why not make an art gallery at home? Then the children's parents could see some of the places we tell them about all the time.

The process for making our in home art gallery went as follows: first pick 7 places, monuments or objects to recreate on paper, next we would go and visit the place or object and look at some of the details on it, third we would sit down in front of the object we were recreating and draw it. We used as many different forms of media for painting as we could. Each picture was either finger painted, colored with crayon, marker, colored pencil, or pen, we also pulled out white chalk and did the Lincoln Memorial at night on black paper. The next step was to take a picture of the children in front of the place or object they had just drawn a picture of. We would then hide it until we had all of the pictures done and ready to hang up.

After a week of going to the National Mall everyday and visiting other locations, we were ready to suprise the parents! We spent some time hanging our art on the walls and adding a few finishing touches, like: making pamphlets that told a couple of fun facts the children had learned about the place or object, putting stickers on the posters, naming our museum exhibit, and putting name and dates on the poster. After all of the finishing touches we were ready!

The children were so excited to show their parents what they had made for them. The parents love the art and the pictures and the children loved telling their parents about the art they had made. Some of the places we had made art of was: U.S. Capitol Building, Lincoln Memorial, The Potomac River-View from Mt. Vernon, Old Glory in the American History Museum, and more! It was a great activity because we learned a lot about American history and had fun doing it.