Bard attitude can be quite a class act if you put your mind to it

For Lynn Yau, creating art is much more than slapping paint on a canvas and hanging it on a wall. Nor is theatre just about delivering lines on stage. To her, the arts can be used as a tool to get people, young and old, to think about all manner of things.

'Children can learn basic art skills in extra-curricular classes, but I use art as a tool to teach them the art of thinking and living,' says Yau, a member of Shakespeare4All, a registered charity dedicated to promoting English fluency and confidence in primary school children through adapted Shakespearean plays.

The group, set up two years ago and headed by artistic director Vicki Ooi, staged its annual production, A Midsummer Night's Dream, last month. It also holds regular drama workshops and classes for its 23 member schools throughout the year.

The next workshop, this month, is for teachers and will focus on basic stage-acting techniques. Yau gave a workshop yesterday at the Centre for Child Development at Hong Kong Baptist University on how to apply the arts in education for the gifted.

The veteran theatre practitioner and educator approaches arts education by encouraging young children to look, listen and ask questions. She uses water, for example, as a subject to promote thought. 'How do you describe water?' she says. 'How does music represent it? How do paintings? How do you see the interaction between different constituents of art? Of course you can draw a river, but that's too basic. What you have to do is to interpret it. Once you know how to interpret it, it's proof you have content in your mind. And once you have your own interpretation, your thoughts become deeper and deeper.'

Under her model of learning, students are also encouraged to examine how objects are represented in famous paintings - and the meanings behind them. 'What do you see in the paintings? A cat? A man? Windows? That's only the beginning,' Yau says. 'If you look more closely, you can compare them, and notice different perspectives. What are these men looking at in different paintings? Why is this man facing us while the other's against us? Why does this man have two faces while the other has only one? These paintings stimulate children's imagination and offer them content to imagine.'

With the government now promoting a more flexible and diversified curriculum, she says teachers should be trained to use arts in education. 'I'm curious why we don't bring arts into education to enrich life.'