CalColor Academy — Attraction in Cupertino

This one star is for a particular teacher in this school, called Ms. Emily.

My daughter attended Ms. Emily's class "Art Exploration 4-6". As a four year old, she is really passionate about painting (you can give her a piece of paper and she will start drawing) and hence we registered her for Calcolor as we heard this program helps nurture kids' interest in arts.

However to our surprise and disappointment, Ms. Emily kept telling us (three times in a row; twice unprompted) that she felt my daughter doesn't have enough art skills to attend her class (even after I asked her isn't this class supposed to be a beginner class and she said yes; and she blamed us for not taking a trial class - while we tried to book one but it is sold out very quickly), she has too many students (she kept emphasizing 9) to teach, the class is too full to allow her to give each kid enough attention, and she complains that my daughter is causing her to pay more attention than she is willing to. In general, she sounds cold and harsh, lacking passion for her job or the young kids in her class, and we are really concerned that my daughter starts losing her interest in painting due to such negative attitude of Ms. Emily. My daughter started telling us that she is being told the class is too hard for her (and she can hear and understand all the comments Ms. Emily shared with us while all the kids were in the room). This is really not a great experience for a 4-year old who is super...

When my son started at CalColor with Ms. Rain during the pandemic, he had been to several other art schools. Ms. Rain immediately became his favorite art teacher. Each class, Ms. Rain evaluates everyone’s work and gives candid feedback. Her calm voice and detail-oriented teaching style foster a focused and engaging class environment.

Ms. Rain truly cares about her students as individuals and the progress they make. She provides material for students with different level of artistic experience, encouraging creativity while focusing on acquiring new techniques. She is a great communicator as well. She makes us feel very much comfortable to check in with her often, with questions which may or may not be related to her class. Ms. Rain even reached out to us when she saw an opportunity for my son to get into a higher-level class when we did not know he could.

In addition to her tremendous ability as a teacher, Ms. Rain’s Portfolio Development Prep class also follows a carefully designed curriculum, covering a variety of important topics with a systematic approach, laying a solid foundation for the aspired future artists. We are very fortunate to have Ms. Rain as my son’s...

My two kids came to CalColor last summer, after a tryout, they both wanted to stay here to learn Arts. So I signed up two weeks’ summer camps for both of them in CalColor, they had so much fun in that two weeks and took back home a lot of amazing arts! Now my son has been in CalColor for a whole year and he got huge improvement on his drawing skills and creativity. He becomes an art lover and enjoys his own drawing and others’. Thanks Ms Lori, Ms Lynne, Ms Yujia and Ms LAN! They are the most energetic and passionate teachers we’ve ever met. They do not only have very strong art/design backgrounds, they also have the ability to understand kids’ needs very well, they instruct kids to use different materials,media, and methods to create the arts from kids’ view. This is so important to keep the individual personality and creativity when the kids doing arts. What’s more, I highly recommend CalColor because of its good kid-teacher ratio, so I won’t worry about the quality of learning due to each kids will have a better attention from the teacher. I feel so lucky that my kids learn art in...