On a quiet Thursday morning, a group of little ones in a Masterworks Museum toddler art class excitedly take up brushes and sponges and a fair amount of paint on their fingers and have a go at making whales.The project holds them fascinated, but to new Masterworks art education coordinator Krystle Paulino the truly exciting works in progress are the children themselves.“What I enjoy about working with the children is the passion and enjoyment that they get out of the art classes,” said Mrs Paulino, 26, who joined Masterworks last month. “They can just be creative and be themselves. Even if they have some sort of frustration in their life they take it out on the paper. It is nice to see what they can create themselves.”Mrs Paulino will be dealing with more than 5,000 children who come through Masterworks Museum annually through programmes such as camps, weekend art events, classes in the government school system and after school classes. Masterworks offers programmes for children as young as “zero”, but this year they will be reaching out more to older children by holding high tech art classes using iPads.“I always loved art,” said Mrs Paulino, “but when I first went to university I wanted to become a lawyer. I swapped after my first year. I have always loved working with children. They are just so unique and happy. The stories they come up with are fun. I did my bachelor of arts degree in general arts at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada and studied early childhood education in an intensive year-long programme at Algonquin College in Ottawa. I was able to do it in a year because I had acquired a lot of volunteer hours working with children and some of that counted as college credit. I had previously volunteered as a tutor at Saltus Grammar School and Somersfield Academy.”After university, she returned to Bermuda and taught at Saltus Grammar School and at Bloomfield Nursery School for several years.“Art as it relates to children has always been a high interest of mine,” she said. “I taught at Saltus for three years, and I always used to help with anything to do with the bulletins or the Christmas plays or things like that. The teachers would always ask me to help draw for things like that. Bloomfield was also a very arty nursery school.”To Mrs Paulino, art is about having fun and using creativity.“I think it is about getting messy too,” she said. “Exploring the different mediums we can use and relating it to the Masterworks art pieces will be key in my classes.”Mrs Paulino can probably identity with a lot of the parents of the children in her younger art classes. She has a daughter Skylar, almost two, who will soon be starting in the Saturday tot classes offered by Masterworks.“I am just starting her into crayons and things like that,” she said. “I like to sketch, but having a young child doesn’t give you much chance to do that sort of thing. I really like listening to music and I take my daughter to a music programme since she was three months old. I play music off the computer to the children in my art classes. I have a tots compact disc with nursery rhymes. I sing nursery rhymes and counting songs to the children while they work.”She is now starting an online master's degree programme in Education and Organisational Management at Endicott College in Massachusetts in the United States“I am creating a portfolio, but I haven’t quite decided what my thesis will be,” she said, “but I think I am going to incorporate the non profit of Masterworks and how art helps children. I think art plays a big part in children’s learning. A lady this morning from a nursery school said a lot of schools are cutting back on art. I think that is a shame because art is good for children. They learn through it, and it gives children the ability to actually be themselves and be creative.”For more information about Masterworks Museum art programmes see their website at www.bermudamasterworks.com or telephone 299-4000.