Saint Ann's School

[EduCativ]

Over the past 50 years, Saint Ann’s has embraced a commitment to education for its own sake, oriented to the capacities of each student, free of the encumbrances of formal grading. At the same time, we are unabashedly committed to excellence in all that we do. The lives of our graduates, their achievements as dancers and doctors, poets and physicists, musicians and mathematicians, speak powerfully to the potential of education based on these principles to ignite a passion for learning and to sustain creative energy in every field of endeavor. We accomplish this by offering talented students instruction shaped by creative and dedicated faculty, forming a true community of learners from pre-Kindergarten through high school.
We invite you to sample on this site the ingredients we offer to students with insatiable appetites for learning and creating.
We believe education is a rich, subtle exploration and questioning of the world, not a means to an end. Since 1965 Saint Ann’s School has brought together gifted children and passionate teachers in a fierce pursuit of knowledge, skill, and artistry. We cultivate a joy for learning through a deep and rigorous curriculum, in which the arts are an essential presence. So that every child will flourish, we eschew grades, rankings, and prizes in favor of ongoing dialogue and teacher reports. At Saint Ann’s we offer our dreams to those who will share theirs with us.
The primary aim of the visual arts program is to elicit from students the most powerful and expressive work possible. This requires profound thought, an enlarging sensibility, and a broader understanding of experience. We aim to help students invent pictorial and plastic activities to carry this wealth of feeling and thought into a comprehensible artistic representation.
In the Preschool and Lower School, the Art Department aims to familiarize the children with a wide range of materials, techniques, and pictorial concepts. We consciously differentiate our studio program from the extensive visual work carried out within the individual classrooms. Along with thematic-based projects, the children enter the ‘art studio’ to become fluent with the ‘language’ of image and object making, to understand the ‘instinctive’ nature of the artistic process, and to become more aware of their own unique ‘vision.’
In Middle School, more sophisticated concepts and techniques are introduced, with a continuing emphasis on drawing, painting, and object making. Along with the continued reinforcement of pictorial and compositional fundamentals (texture, form, rhythm, color), contextual, poetic, and conceptual notions are explored. Building skills are expanded through work in plaster, clay, cardboard, and wood. Ultimately, students find their relationship to art through the viewing, discussing, and making of artworks.

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