A great classroom moment is when students are working happily together, curriculums are being integrated, children are loving the learning process, and the results are becoming realized. Hopefully, this type of moment happens in a classroom more often that not, but those of us in the trenches of teaching know it isn't always so easy. So when it happens, you might want to bottle up any discernible ingredients and try to go for it all over again!

One such moment happened in Intermediate West in the spring of 2009. Our classroom of 9-12 year-olds had taken on "project work." This is something we always do in the spring with the intention of presenting our final accomplishments to parents on the last day of school. Small groups are formed, usually with an older student as the leader of the group. Genders and age groups are mixed so each cluster is a representation of the abilities of the larger classroom. This year our project work was coined America's Past in Painting.

Meadow Montessori School's upper elementary classrooms received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the form of posters representing paintings, sculpture, architecture, and arts and crafts spanning pre-colonial to modern American art history this year. The grant is called Picturing America and indeed the posters and accompanying resource book do give a thorough picture of America's past. Luckily, the grant also came with an invitation to attend a workshop at the University of Michigan's Museum of Art so we teachers could better utilize the gift we received. The posters, resource book, and seminar resulted in one of the best teaching moments of my career.

Landscape painting is unique to American art and oil painting. This became the focus of a project our class took on to better understand what makes our country unique and the stories our culture alone can tell. This doesn't mean that American painters were the only ones to paint landscape, yet American landscape is usually identifiable and tells an American story.

Our students broke into four groups to tackle the concept of American landscape painting from four different genres. The four paintings were Albert Bierstadt's Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California 1865; Winslow Homer's The Veteran in a New Field, 1865; Charles Sheeler's American Landscape, 1930; and Richard Diebenkorn's Cityscape I, 1963. Although these four paintings are just a sampling of the posters from Picturing America, each group compared and contrasted to at least two other posters, learning about movements in painting and particular artists' styles and stories.

The students learned art history jargon, how to study a painting in more detail, and how to connect a painting to an historical moment. Not only that, some students also leaned songs, poetry, and quotations from the time period they studied. They found art reflects culture, but art can also determine culture and a people's point of view, especially in relation to American expansionism and industrial identity. Indeed, they were even able to connect to current views and how American sensibilities have changed.

The best part came when the students completed their own paintings in the style of their chosen artist. This was the part that was perhaps the most fun, but also challenging since each student became an artist of a collaborative work. Along with the technicalities of brush stroke, color, and light, the students also tried to emulate the strong emotions, messages, and storytelling that their master painters achieved.

In a relatively short amount of time, our class had learned aspects of art history, painting, big moments in American history, and worked beautifully and productively in groups. The most rewarding quote from a child (among many great quotes) may be: "We learned that when you look at art more carefully and take your time to see all the elements, there is so, so, so much more to the story than you first notice."