With funding from the city of Sunnyvale, the museum offers free art classes once a week for third- through fifth-grade students at five Sunnyvale elementary schools.

Some students come from low-income households, have family members with addiction problems or are facing other situations that may cause poor academic or social skills.

This year's five schools are Braly, Ellis, Fairwood, Nimitz and San Miguel. Although all of them are within Sunnyvale, they cover Cupertino, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara Union school districts.

The classes meet once a week starting in October and ending in late April or May. Although classes are open to all students, school principals and community resource officers recommend children they think might benefit from the added attention, intervention and inspiration the classes can provide.

"There are almost always long waiting lists, so we break the year up into two semesters and give children on the waiting lists a chance to be in the classes the second semester," Argabrite says.

Over the past 11 years, more than 2,500 students have participated in the program.

On a recent Friday afternoon, 15 fifth-graders from Fairwood Elementary School decorated newspaper hats. Getting dirty was the last thing they worried about. One student squeezed layers of red, blue and yellow paint on his hat. Paint smeared the table and his pants. Another student glued beads and strings on her hat. Her hands were sticky with white glue.

"It's fun," said Maxwell Junge, 10, while gluing more beads on his already heavily decorated hat. "It doesn't matter how clean your hands are. They just get dirty again."

The classes are taught by professional artists with teaching experience, and most of them have a master's degree in fine arts. The classroom assistants are usually De Anza students who are often art and teaching majors and are interested in working with children. The students work with the museum to plan for lessons and help the art teachers.

"Every year, I meet some De Anza students who were in one of our art classes when they were children," Argabrite says. "They told me they remembered having me as their art teacher. It makes me feel so old sometimes, but it also makes me feel good that they wanted to pursue art."

Artist Frances Paragon-Arias has been teaching in the program off and on for more than 15 years. Her students have worked with different media, ranging from drawing to painting to printmaking to sculpture.

"The most challenging part of my job is encouraging students to make mistakes and not to think that everything has to be perfect," says Paragon-Arias. "If you encourage them to experiment, it gives them more confidence and they will try something different next time."

Argabrite says having that creativity is important for these at-risk students.

"A major part of the program is creative thinking. For example, in this class, you give the students the same material and they are creating 15 different hats," Argabrite says. "These children run into many difficulties in their lives. They will know to use the creative thinking skills they have learned from art to deal with them."

Fairwood fifth-grader Praneeth Kollareddy says he enjoys the class because he gets to do more art than he normally does.

"It is a break from our tests," says Kollareddy, 10. "It is very relaxing for me."

In addition to the after-school art classes, the Euphrat invites students to take a free tour of the museum. With their regular classroom teachers, students are bussed over to the museum and participate in interactive discussions and hands-on activities based on the exhibition. This year about 250 kindergarten through fifth-grade students from Nimitz school have visited the museum, plus an additional 600 from other schools.

Artwork from the classes has been exhibited in a number of places, including various local schools, the Sunnyvale Public Library, the Sunnyvale Creative Arts Gallery in the Quinlan Community Center, and at the Euphrat Museum itself.

In April an installation of student work was included in the Euphrat's "Rethinking Nature" exhibit. Inspired by the artwork in the exhibit, students worked with a variety of natural materials to create insects, plants, animal sculptures and drawings.

Fairwood fifth-grader Carl Wap, 10, is excited that the cockroach he made was highly admired by Paragon-Arias and museum visitors.

"The art class is cool," says Wap, wearing his colorful hat as if he were an Indian chief. "I've gotten to do some great things I haven't done before, like spray-painting. I really enjoy it."

For more information call Diana Argabrite at 408.864.5464.