Santa Clara Elementary School (SCES) provides a California Core-based comprehensive, hands-on Art and Art Program for all our students in Grades TK-8, as we believe in the importance of educating the "whole child". 

Our SCES school-wide Art Program focuses on building an appreciation and understanding of the importance of visual arts in all our students, beginning in Transitional Kindergarten and culminating in Eighth Grade. To achieve this, our teachers utilize many types of art media with the students, including: pastels, watercolor, collage, pencil sketching, tempera, acrylics and clay. Two important components of our SCES Art Program are building self-confidence in each student, so they learn to trust their own inherent ability to create art, and increasing the student’s awareness of the impact of the visual arts in their own world.

Beginning in Transitional Kindergarten and extending through Second Grade, students explore the basic tools used to create art and develop an “art vocabulary”. SCES students in the lower grades are introduced to cutting, painting, clay modeling, along with learning about the major artists and art periods throughout time around the world.

During Third through Fifth Grades, students are taught to develop their perceptual skills, as they use expanded art media to create unique works of art. These Intermediate Grade SCES students are introduced to the concepts of perspective, value, gestural and contour drawing, as well as mixed-media productions.

Sixth Grade through Eighth Grade students develop an appreciation of how art masterpieces, from early Cave Paintings through the Ancient Empires, to Impressionism through the Modern and Abstract periods were created by of the major artists from those periods.