WAYNE -- Wayne Elementary School's third- and fourth-grade students last week devoted their time in the school's library to learning about biographies.

Janet Adelberg, the school's librarian, closed a book she was reading to the students and asked them to turn to Martin Puryear's painting "Ladder for Booker T. Washington."

The artwork depicts a long, wavy step ladder propped up at a steep incline.

"If this ladder is for Booker T. Washington, does it say anything about his life?" Adelberg asked the students.

Teachers at the elementary school are beginning to integrate images from a 40-painting collection the school recently received into lessons in a variety of subject areas, from English to music.

The copies of American history-related works of art came to the school as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant award. The program is known as "Picturing America."

Each of the six schools and three public libraries in the Maranacook-area school district, which serves students from Manchester, Mount Vernon, Readfield and Wayne, received a set of the 40 paintings.

At Wayne Elementary School, Adelberg and the school's art and music teachers have begun shuffling the paintings around their classrooms to add to classroom lessons' visual appeal.

On Tuesday, Adelberg used Puryear's work to introduce the students to Booker T. Washington.

"Can we assume he had a tough life?" she asked, encouraging students to "look a little deeper" for the art's meaning.

A resource book that accompanies the 40-painting package aids instructors in teaching the context behind each work. It also recommends age-appropriate questions to encourage discussion about each painting.

The 40-painting package includes reproductions depicting scenes from the American Revolution through the 20th century. Featured artists include Norman Rockwell, Mary Cassatt, Frank Lloyd Wright and Dorothea Lange.

At Wayne Elementary School, music classes have used images in conjunction with lessons about the national anthem.

In art class recently, students were at work making prints of leaves. From the "Picturing America" collection, art teacher Dona Seegers hung a set of quilts from the 19th and 20th centuries. She asked the students to imitate the quilts' "warm colors."

A few days later, as Seegers explained brush strokes to her students, she asked them to imitate Winslow Homer's "The Veteran in a New Field."

"I'm hoping to use them every week and tie it in with the vocabulary that we're using," Seegers said. "They're going to get a lot of use."

Adelberg, who splits her time between the elementary school's library and Wayne's Cary Memorial Library, said she has found the artwork useful in supplementing book-based lessons.

"I've been amazed," she said, "at how much there is to learn from each one."

While third-grade student Ally Phair prefers to learn about history through reading, she said there are lessons to be learned from observing related artwork.

"It tells me that Paul Revere was telling everybody that the British was coming so they could get out of the village fast," Ally, 8, said about Grant Wood's painting "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere."

"This one tells me that he was a maker of silver things," Ally said of John Singleton Copley's portrait of the revolutionary hero showing off a silver teapot.

Matthew Stone -- 623-3811, Ext. 435

mstone@centralmaine.com