In The Classroom:

Ask local fourth-graders about their favorite field trip, and many will probably say it was their trip to the Orange County Museum of Art.

Every fourth-grader in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District is given the opportunity to visit the museum, thanks to a one-of-a-kind partnership between the district and the museum in Newport Beach.

During their field trip, the kids get an extensive hands-on art experience and a customized, docent-led gallery tour. The program is in line with state visual arts and social studies educational standards, as the museum always features at least one California artist.

The kids also practice their language skills, including writing, listening and speaking.

Last week, children from Whittier Elementary School in Costa Mesa took part in the program. They made a flipbook of animals transforming into other animals, which taught them to identify positive and negative space, made from images from one of the featured artists’ archive.

Then they toured several exhibitions that took them from the California desert to Mexico to China, which reinforced the concepts learned during the flipbook exercise.

Docent Mary Lee Gair, a retired fourth-grade teacher, focused on the sense of place during her tour.

“The beauty of art is that we, through art, can visit different places,” she told the students.

“We’re really fortunate to have such a dedicated group of volunteers,” Director of Education Kristine Bowen said of the docents. “They’re just such an asset to the museum.”

The student tours are dialogue-heavy, with the docent eliciting answers from the students about emotions they experience while looking at an exhibition, or asking them for words to describe a piece of art.

During a video exhibition of work by a young Chinese filmmaker, the kids were given reporter’s notebooks and tasked with writing a headline and writing and drawing details from the film.

Museum officials said the students’ teacher, Mary Becker, was a model example of an instructor who dives into the program, attending museum trainings and incorporating art into her curriculum.

“She’s just a great example of a teacher who uses tools to bring visual art to kids,” said Scott Fitzpatrick of the district.

“It’s easy because they give us a pre-activity, and the packets are phenomenal,” Becker said.

“This is our favorite field trip every year.”

The museum’s partnership with the district began in the 2005-06 school year.