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Susan Striker is the author of the best-selling Anti-Coloring Book® series with over one million books in print all over the world. Designed to stimulate creativity and encourage problem
solving and critical thinking, the books help children draw their own pictures as well as their own conclusions about life. She also wrote Please Touch® (Simon & Schuster) which teaches
parents and educators how to stimulate creativity through movement, music, art and play. Young at Art® (Henry Holt) is a comprehensive text about the value and significance of early
childhood art. That book clearly demonstrates the important link between early scribbles and later literacy.
Ms. Striker teaches elementary school art in Greenwich, Connecticut, where her school won the National Reading Award. Among the considerations of the judges was her
literature based art program. She has a unique style of motivating children to create by integrating art with music and literature. She has had a long, successful career teaching art to
young children, has taught art education methodology to university students and developed art curricula. She shares her
innovative teaching ideas in workshops for parents and teachers in schools and universities all over the country. Ms. Striker’s work has been the subject of numerous television shows, both local, national
and international.
In 1984 Ms. Striker founded Young at Art, a private art school in Manhattan, offering classes to
young children. “Its aim”, she explains, “was to spark creativity, generate fantasy and unleash
imaginative thinking.” There she held classes for children, ages one through five, and gave birthday parties where art activities were the focus of the day. Her school was not only the talk of the town,
but was featured in newspaper and magazine articles as far away as Japan. Sue is beginning a Young at Art’s Outreach program and is beginning to work on licensing schools all over the country. Her
dream is to see her art classes for young children brought to children of all economic backgrounds throughout the world.
Ms. Striker has a solid reputation as an expert in art education. She acted as a consultant for the popular television show Thomas the Train, has written many magazine articles and contributes
regularly to School Arts. Susan’s Young at Art's curriculum for preschool and kindergarten art was awarded Connecticut's Celebration of Excellence for Creativity in the Classroom.
In 2000 she won the Distinguished Teacher Award in Greenwich. In March, 2004 Teaching K-8, a national magazine written for elementary school teachers featured Ms. Striker as the Author of the
Month, in honor of National Youth Art Month. In 2008 - Susan received the highly competitive 2008 Connecticut Art Education Association Award, Outstanding Elementary Art Educator, for
significant contributions to the field of art education.
Ms. Striker lives in Easton, Connecticut. She is divorced and has one son, Jason, who lives in Colorado. Her readers know Jason very well, as he appeared in or on the cover of all of the books
she wrote after his birth in 1979. Sue collects folk art and is now working on a series of books about folk art for young children, and shopping it around to publishers.
Contact Susan Striker
Susan was recently featured in the Greenwich Time
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Edition: Greenwich Time, Page A001
By Colin Gustafson
STAFF WRITER
Cos Cob School art teacher Susan Striker has always considered herself "math phobic."
As a grade-school student, Striker hated having to go to math class, detested the homework and
dreaded the quizzes. And as an art teacher, math has long been among the furthest topics from her mind.
So when Cos Cob's principal, Kimberly Beck, recently handed her a copy of the school's math
curriculum and pointed out how much it overlapped with her art lessons, Striker was at first incredulous.
"My first reaction: she was nuts," Striker recalled of the
encounter last year. "Here I was teaching perspective, and calling it art, and down the hall, they were teaching perspective, and calling it math."
This fall, however, the art lover and self-professed "math phobe" has combined the two topics in an interdisciplinary teaching project that she's dubbed "Art-Rithmetic."
The focal point of that project is a new art display in the school's second-floor hallway where Striker has posted prints of favorite artworks alongside banners that hail the mathematical concept each
illustrates.
For instance, an Andy Warhol painting of the pop artist's image reproduced in various color schemes
on a calendar-like grid illustrates the concept of an "array," which is used at the school to teach to multiplication and division.
Nearby, a painting by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein of a woman's hand coating a slice of bread with butter illustrates addition. A Jim Dine sketch, "Portrait of Mr. Blitz," of a sullen-looking man whose
body has been partially erased, illustrates subtraction.
"It's so much more alive to show a child the patterns in a (painting) than to say, 'This is one, two, one,
two," Striker said. "I'm using an exciting medium to teach all this stuff that I thought was boring."
In addition to exposing students to great artworks, the exhibit is intended to help illuminate basic mathematical concepts, particularly for students who may be strong visual learners, but have had
difficulty on math assessments, Beck said.
About a third of the art concepts highlighted in the display -- from parallel and perpendicular lines, to
symmetry, perspective and patterns -- relate directly to math concepts tested on the Connecticut Mastery Test, according to the principal.
"For kids who consider themselves math-phobic and are certainly much more artistically inclined or more visually inclined, this draws parallels -- pun intended -- for them. And they understand it better,"
Beck said.
One of the most educational artworks on display at Cos Cob School, she believes, is Piet Mondrian's
famous "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," the 1943 abstract painting that appears in the Museum of Modern Art.
Striker said she included Mondrian's piece, inspired by the brightly lit city grid of Manhattan, to educate her students about the use of primary colors, straight lines and geometric patters in painting.
Beck said those concepts and others appearing on state tests, such as intersecting and parallel lines, the formation of polygons, sequences and right angles, come to light in Mondrian's masterpiece as well.
"Honestly this (painting) represents three-quarters of the geometry strand on the CMT," she said.
In addition to setting up the exhibit, Striker has compiled a binder of tips for fellow teachers on how to incorporate art into their lessons. She also plans to work closely with art-oriented kids who have
had particular difficulty in math, like her.
On top of that, Striker hopes to update her hallway exhibit later in the school year. One idea she has
is to illustrate subtraction using a Michelangelo sculpture and quote.
"Michelangelo is quoted as having said "| he didn't understand why anybody didn't look at a piece of
marble and see that he had just removed everything but the angel."
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