Kids’ Art & Leadership Lab: From the Inside Out (8-11 year old) - Winter 2025

Location:
Arts Wayland Gallery
35 Andrew Ave., Wayland MA 01778

Instructor: Isabel Zhang

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Description: 

What if your child could learn to see their life the way an artist does? With curiosity, courage, and the freedom to make mistakes?

Rooted in neuroscience and social-emotional learning, this workshop helps children strengthen focus, empathy, and resilience. Kids get to discover that art isn’t just what we create; it’s how we live.

Life, like art, is a process of creation, messy, layered, and full of revisions. This workshop explores how the principles of art, presence, perspective, patience, and expression, are the same skills that shape social emotional intelligence, which is foundational to life.

Your child will look at how art reveals the way we experience emotion, make meaning, and relate to others. Participants will leave seeing that art isn’t something we make, it’s how we live our life too. That our life is a piece of artwork. When we understand the art in ourselves, we can meet life with more curiosity, compassion, and creativity.

Weekly activities include hands-on projects like designing bracelets and keychains that remind them of their personal values, visual reflection activities and guided art prompts that build self awareness and discovery, discussion around art and leadership through the lens of visionaries like Picasso and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and how that they too are leaders of their own right. Each week, students will build toward a personal “masterpiece” that reflects both artistic and self expression.

The program blends creativity and brain science. It brings out explicitly the tangible connections between “art is life” and “life is art.” Children learn to transform everyday life into a masterpiece. 

Included are also weekly parent emails of recap & ways to support at home. What’s learned in class is meant to be lived, practiced, and shared at home and in the world. The program is built in partnership with parents, offering full transparency and weekly updates so you’ll always know what your child is learning, practicing, and creating.

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A tailored bio specific to this workshop series: 

Isabel Zhang is a firm believer that art is not just what we create, it’s how we live. Our life is our own unique masterpiece. A published peer-reviewed research author in The Journal of Nutrition as well as Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Isabel has also co-authored an Amazon #1 best-selling book specifically benefiting Hayden’s Ray, a nonprofit organization in Arkansas USA. She self published, authored, and illustrated a children’s book “Icky Colors in My Food”, aiming specifically to educate and spark healthy conversations with young kids about healthy nutrition and toxic food dyes.

Her love for art was apparent at a young age, from sewing clothes for her dolls to her sketches and writings, to internships in art museums (The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Rubin Museum of Art) in New York City. Today, Isabel continues to nurture her love for the arts through writing, sketching, acrylic painting, watercolor painting, and dancing, weaving those creative endeavors into her work with children. Isabel is a firm believer that art can open minds, build empathy, and tell the story of the human experience that perhaps human language cannot encapsulate.

Any and all learning can be exponentiated when it is research-based. In this workshop series, Isabel integrates neuroscience, psychology, social emotional intelligence and leadership with art to strengthen empathy, confidence, focus, and resilience. Foundation to any youth programming by Isabel is the intentional highlights from the CASEL 5 for social emotional competences: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. In the end, it’s not about what we know, but how we navigate life’s challenges, with awareness and heart. These are the life tools Isabel wants every child to carry. Isabel is firmly committed to creating partnerships with parents so as to not have the lessons learned each week stay in isolation, instead that they lead to growth and expansion for all children. 

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Testimonies

"The content is good and is giving him positive ideas of situations. 
He is talking more about positive enforcement. 
He is able to label his situation and emotions. 
He is getting more mature with all of this. 
Good topic and can positively impact in the long-term. 
I flag your email. Even myself I am learning!" - Elias' mother

"I have been very happy with the way Andrew is reacting to the classes. He’s been more thoughtful and every time I ask him what he thinks about the program - he’s been very positive! He’s been of main focuses for me with Andrew has been around taking responsibility and making sure he stay honest and keeps his word. I think he’s been doing much better lately!" - Andrew's father