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It's Tuesday, and 7-year-old Tiffany Bland knows what's on the agenda today: "painting!"

Tiffany, who is home-schooled in Hyattsville with her 9-year-old sister Trinity, has been taking an art class since last year through the Greenbelt Association for Visual Arts, or GAVA, with association president Barbara Simon.

The class has expanded recently to include instructor Ingrid Cowan Hass, who teaches the class monoprinting.

"Mono means one, so with monoprinting, you get effects from monoprinting that you can't get from other types of painting," Hass said.

Hass is a 1993 graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., where she majored in art and music. She is now a professional opera singer and has taught piano to children for the past 12 years.

"It was actually through monoprinting that I met Barbara, because I entered my prints into an art show and she saw them," said Hass, who has been a Greenbelt resident since 1998.

Simon began teaching painting to children at the Greenbelt Community Center in 1997. Soon after, she was approached by parents of home-schooled children and began a class for them in 1998 to help provide socialization and additional art education. She has also been a resident artist at Greenbelt Elementary School for 25 years.

In 2004, Simon moved the GAVA painting class for both home-schooled and afterschool children to the Greenbelt-Mowatt United Methodist Church, where it has been ever since.

The church offered a large space for the children to paint, and the group pays the church a small fee for electricity and water, she said. The supplies and some class fees for low-income children are funded through GAVA, as well as a grant from the Prince George's County Arts Council.

"The mothers of the students didn't want me to quit teaching, so they looked around for a church that would give us some room," Simon said.

During the Oct. 10 class, all nine students in the home-school program made the monoprints by placing a clean piece of paper on top of their recently finished paintings, then peeling the papers apart to reveal mirror images of the original.

Six-year-old Abrielle Pearson of Bowie made a monoprint of purple grass, a brown sun, two butterflies and a flower.

"Usually my mom paints stuff and I get my ideas from my mom's painting. She likes flowers too," Abrielle said. "I also like to paint horses and hamsters."

Bowie resident Claudia Reid said her daughters, Alyssa Reid, 9, and Alexis Reid, 7, have been in the class for three years.

"The interaction between Ms. Barbara and the kids is great," Reid said. "She's wonderful with them."

LaShon Bland, the mother of Tiffany and Trinity, said she heard about the class through a flier in the library and thought it was a good way to expose her daughters to art education. She said Simon's class includes not only making art but also lectures about artists.

Simon teaches two one-hour classes for students age 5 to 12 at the church. The first one runs between 2 to 3 p.m. for home-schooled children, and the second runs between 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. for afterschool children.

The home-schooled children come from Greenbelt, Hyattsville, Bowie, Seabrook and Davidsonville, and the 14 afterschool children come from Greenbelt Elementary School, St. Hugh of Grenoble School in Greenbelt and Friends Community School in College Park, Simon said.

In the fall, the students paint, and in the spring they work on printmaking. One of GAVA's other programs includes a year-round animation class for high school-age children.

E-mail Jordan Attebury at jattebury@gazette.net.