Teaching Art in the Elementary Classroom: Ideas for Non-Art Specialists

Most elementary teachers feel underprepared to teach art — they didn't study it, they don't consider themselves artists, and they're not sure where to start. But art instruction doesn't require artistic talent. It requires exposure to ideas, materials, and techniques, and the willingness to learn alongside your students. Here's what works for classroom teachers who aren't art specialists.

What Art Education Actually Develops

Before diving into activities, it's worth understanding what art education is actually for. Creating finished products (a nice painting to take home) is the least important outcome. The more important ones: visual thinking (the ability to observe, analyze, and represent what you see), creative problem-solving (exploring multiple approaches to an open-ended challenge), persistence and revision (the willingness to make something, evaluate it, and make it better), and cultural literacy (understanding how art reflects and shapes human experience).

This reframe matters because it removes the pressure to produce impressive products. A lesson where students carefully observe a flower and try to capture its structure in pencil — even if the drawings aren't "good" by anyone's standards — develops visual thinking. That's the point.

Start With Observation Drawing

The foundational art skill that transfers to everything else is careful observation. Most people look at things without really seeing them — the general shape, the obvious features, and that's it. Learning to draw means learning to see: to notice the specific curve of a petal, the way light changes across a surface, the relationship between parts.

Contour drawing (drawing the outline of an object while looking at it rather than the paper) is an accessible entry point. Have students choose a simple object — a shoe, a crumpled piece of paper, a plant — and draw its outline slowly, focusing their eyes on the object rather than the drawing. The results are often surprisingly detailed. The exercise trains attention.

From contour drawing, you can build toward gesture drawing (capturing movement and energy quickly), still-life observation, and portrait work. Each builds on the foundational skill of really looking.

Teach Technique, Then Let Students Experiment

Art instruction that just tells students to "be creative" without teaching any techniques leaves students stranded. Creativity requires materials and methods to work with. Before each project, teach a specific technique explicitly.

Techniques accessible to non-art-specialist teachers:

• Watercolor washes and layering: how water and pigment interact, wet-on-wet versus wet-on-dry
• Color mixing: primary, secondary, and tertiary colors; warm and cool; analogous and complementary
• Value and shading: how to create the illusion of light and shadow with a pencil by varying pressure
• Composition principles: rule of thirds, leading lines, balance, focal point
• Texture techniques: collage, printmaking with common objects, scratch art

These can each be introduced in a 10-minute demonstration. Students practice the technique, then apply it in a project of their own. The technique gives them a tool; the project gives them a problem to solve with it.

Integrate Art With Content Subjects

Art integrated with content instruction gives both the art and the content more meaning. Some examples:

A science unit on animals: students observe an animal carefully (from photographs or specimens) and draw its structural features in detail — not for aesthetics but for understanding. Naturalist illustration has a long history for exactly this reason.

A social studies unit on a historical period: students research visual elements of that period — architecture, clothing, art styles — and create work inspired by it. Understanding why art looked different in different periods teaches something about culture and history.

A poetry unit: visual poetry, concrete poetry, or illustrated poetry books combine literary and visual art in ways that reinforce both.

Use Artist Studies to Build Art Historical Literacy

Exposing students to artists' work — and talking about it — develops art historical literacy and provides inspiration for their own work. This doesn't require knowing a lot about art history. It requires showing students work, asking good questions, and facilitating discussion.

Good discussion questions for looking at any piece of art: What do you notice first? What do you see when you look longer? What mood or feeling does this create? What choices did the artist make (color, line, shape, subject matter)? What questions do you have about it?

Then: can students identify something in the artist's technique they'd like to try in their own work? Artist studies are most powerful when they lead to experimentation rather than imitation — "inspired by" rather than "copy of."

Manage Materials and Setup

One reason art falls off in elementary classrooms is logistical friction — getting out materials, working with wet paint, cleaning up before the next period. Reduce friction by:

Setting up a permanent art materials station rather than distributing and collecting each time. Having clear clean-up roles and procedures established before the first art lesson. Starting with dry media (pencil, crayon, colored pencil, collage) before introducing wet media (paint, glue). Keeping projects to one to two class periods rather than multi-week commitments that are hard to sustain.

The most common art curriculum mistake is overambitious project scope. A 45-minute lesson with a clear technique and a completed piece is more sustainable than a three-week mural project that unravels by week two.

Assess for Process, Not Product

If you grade art, assess the process rather than the product. Checklists work better than rubrics for art because they evaluate effort, technique, and revision rather than aesthetic quality — which is highly subjective and which you're not qualified to assess as a non-specialist (and arguably wouldn't be even as one).

A process checklist: Did the student follow the technique instruction? Did the student make adjustments when something wasn't working? Did the student complete the work? Did the student engage with the artist study? These criteria assess what actually matters and avoid the trap of grading whose drawing "looks the best."

Your Next Step

Pick one technique from this post — contour drawing is a good starting point — and plan a single 30-45 minute lesson around it. Gather the materials (paper and pencil, plus an interesting object for each student or shared at tables), introduce the technique with a brief demo, give students time to practice, and debrief what they noticed. You don't need to be an artist to teach this lesson. You just need to try it.