Harker preschoolers learned about prehistoric art, then made some of their own, last week. Michael Ear, the new art teacher at the preschool, led the expedition.

“To begin the year, I wanted to talk about the earliest and oldest painting ever done by humans,” said Ear. “Saying that this was about 35,000 years ago doesn’t mean much without the context of what life was like, so I started describing how there were no cars and no homes to live in. The people lived in caves for shelter and to tell stories, they painted on the walls.

“The examples we looked at were of a pig-deer eating berries and handprints. I had the students guess what they were looking at, but the paintings were hard to see because it was so long ago. I suggested we go into a time machine to see the paintings fresh on the walls of a cave. But some of them needed reference for what a time machine is, so we saw a clip of Back to the Future and that gave them an idea of what it would be like to travel through time.

“We turned off the art studio lights, grabbed a lantern and a flashlight and traveled back in time – and we saw a cave in the corner of the room! We entered and looked for some kind of painting similar to what we saw in the present. After 30 seconds of searching with a flashlight, the kids shouted, ‘There!’ and we found a handprint and a bison. It was glowing! I asked if they also wanted to paint their handprints on the walls and they used similar glow-in-the-dark paints to do so. We left the cave and returned to the future with our new paintings from the cave to take home and make glow in the dark,” he finished. What a great outing!