For blind students, a place where art and life skills meet

Using jigs, the boys mount melted-crayon images to cards, place them in plastic bags, stamp them, and insert a card explaining how the art is done. This is mechanical work, but the boys enjoy it and are diligent.

Learning routines is important in their daily lives. "I want them to be paying attention," Ms. Tomascoff says. "The students are part of the quality control, and there's problem-solving that has to go on."

Doing art, she says, also helps children who may be tactually defensive.

"Especially with younger kids, there is a lot of tentativeness and hesitancy," she says. "They can be anxious about moving and reaching out, since people often say, 'Be careful, you might run into that,' or 'Watch out, that might be sharp,' so they start pulling back."

Art is a nonthreatening opportunity for them to experience the world with their hands. Students constantly manipulate different materials, wet and dry, hard and soft, rough and smooth.

They also work the bobbin and the foot pedal of the sewing machine in assembling the patchwork quilts. Feeling safe using tools with supervision is a goal, too, although Tomascoff does the actual sewing.

Older, advanced students like Luis Marquez become very adept studying the feel of things, such as the stuffed animals in the school's large collection. With feedback from Werner, who tells him when he's got the proportions right, he quickly fashions a realistic rabbit from clay, and adds a carrot as an afterthought.

For work on a landscape, students may head outside to study trees, touching their trunks and feeling the crevices.

Skies and colors can't be touched, of course. That's when the teacher talks concepts, such as warm and cold colors, summer and winter skies, or foregrounds and backgrounds.

These are important for students who try two-dimensional art. It doesn't appeal to some children, but others want to do two-dimensional work "because that's what the world is," Werner explains. "If you could see out the window, you would see a landscape even though everything is three-dimensional."

Adding sand to paint gives colors individual textures and helps the blind artists with placement. But the students also tap the teacher's vision.

"I'll look at a painting and say, 'What are you trying to accomplish?' " Werner says. "I'll tell them what I see or don't see. I'll ask, 'What's really important in this picture? The trees? Well, I don't see the trees. How can I see them better? Maybe use more color.' "

A student determines when a work of art is finished, and it varies widely. Some may be satisfied after two days. Others can work on a painting or hooked rug for practically the entire school year.

Even if students can't paint realistically, they can do expressive mark-making. Werner can identify each student's work when they decorate window panes with splashes of color, because the marks are so different.

The important thing, she says, is to find what a student is "jazzed about." For one verbally challenged student it was channeling her love of music into the creation of a beautiful mosaic table. She drummed and beat to music as she smashed tiles and then painted them. The finished piece won a national award.

E-mail: atkinr@csps.com.

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