Project Based

In 1985, Kim Frassett began an innovative art education program in her garage in Huntington Beach, California. She began to teach her own children art lessons that coordinated with their history or science subjects. Believing primary sources to be the most truthful and interesting source of educational information she used art samples from the period under study as examples in art history or science to teach her students representational drawing. She began to include her children’s friends in these art lessons. The classes grew until she was teaching as many as 350 students a week in various locations throughout Los Angeles and Orange County.

Since that time, the vision and scope of her program have grown. She has spent the last 20 years developing this idea into an interdisciplinary art education program where the student learns representational drawing technique at the same time as they are learning science or history, writing and geography.

Her work experience includes teaching this program to Home Educated Students for 10 years at Biola University in La Mirada, while concurrently instructing autistic students at Speech and Language Development Center in Buena Park.

She started a children’s art school in 2007 which has Charter School and Home Educated students as its population. She has recently completed a BFA in Drawing & Painting from Laguna College of Art & Design in Painting and Drawing, which she has pursued with the purpose of learning the most current techniques in art education and improving her own artistic skills.

The time-honored tradition of copying the great masters of art is founded on the same principles that compel us to have our children learn from Beethoven or Bach in their music studies. As the student learns their grade level history or science lessons, we coordinate an art lesson, which is drawn from a primary source, and teach the student to make a master copy.

The student not only learns the art history, historical facts about the time and place but also experiences the culture of the people while they are learning artistic skills. They put this art project into their sketchbook. This sketchbook also includes a short student-written narration about the period studied (writing), student drawn maps (geography), and a timeline of world events (math). All student work is mounted into the sketchbook in a chronological fashion along the timeline (math).

By the time the student has completed their school year, they have written and illustrated a history or science book. It is quite an accomplishment for any person. They learn creativity as well as experience the fulfillment of completing a monumental task.

This curriculum fulfills all the ideals of a STEAM education. Science & Technology, interpreted through Engineering & the Arts, all based on Mathematical elements. The A stands for the Arts; it includes the liberal arts, which include Language Arts, Social Studies, Physical Arts, Fine Arts & Music that each shape developments in STEM fields.