The Iowa City Art Program conceptualizes each student as a creating, thinking, responsive person with unique and significant contributions to make to society. The program provides a variety of art experiences aimed at building self-esteem and teaching technical, perceptual, and critical thinking skills. These experiences include making, studying and appreciating art. In this manner, students are assisted to understand themselves, history, and other cultures more fully. The program provides students with the tools to communicate visually as well as the tools to analyze and interpret the visual world.
Art is seen as essential to each student's education.
It validates the individual's uniqueness, encourages creativity, promotes higher order thinking skills, and contributes to a better understanding of the world. The students in grades K-6 meet with the art teacher one day per week for approximately fifty minutes. Classes are grouped by grade level and in some cases multi-age units. Several courses in the visual arts provide students with a wide variety of art media in both two dimensional and three dimensional study. These courses can be selected at various grade levels for a single trimester.