The drawings in this gallery were created for a First Grade class which I taught at a small Waldorf school in the San Fernando Valley, in 2008-09. The images served as seasonal classroom decoration, and to illustrate stories and lessons which I was presenting at the time. Waldorf schools are celebrated for their integration of the arts within everyday curricula, providing an enriching educational experience.

The chalks I used were manufactured by Mercurius (mercurius-usa.com), a German company specializing in high-quality art materials, musical instruments, and classroom supplies which are used in many Waldorf schools. These chalks look and perform similarly to artist's pastels, yielding brilliant, saturated colors which blend easily.

The two blackboards on which I worked had many surface imperfections which affected the continuity of the images, but given the school's slim operating budget, installing new, perfectly flat blackboards would have been out of the equation. Ultimately, no one seemed to mind.