Students Are Speaking the 7 Habits

My sixth grade students love to come to the art room at the end of the day to work on projects, help clean up or sometimes just play with art materials. Friday in particular is clean-up day, and for some odd reason many students want to come down to my room and CLEAN! I'm sure their parents would be surprised to know this, even the students that tell me they don't clean their rooms will clean my art room. On one particular Friday, four girls wanted to splatter paint like Jackson Pollack. Now this style of painting can get very messy, so I told them they could as long as they prepared the tables for painting, and cleaned up the entire mess when they were finished. They agreed and started to prep the room. When they finally finished painting, I looked at my room and it was a disaster! I wondered if they would clean it all up in the manner I was expecting. To my surprise they began the task of putting the papers in the drying rack, collecting the newspaper and putting it in the recycle bin, and finally washing the tables, cleaning the brushes and putting all the paint away in the cabinets. One girl joked "hey, we're synergizing" and I replied "yes, you are and it's awesome!" I laughed to myself and was really excited that this student used the language that we've been teaching them since September. It's only a matter of time that our students fully adopt the 7 Habits, and use the language in their every day conversations.

Sharpening the Saw Sculpture

My second grade art students are working on Hip-hop Haring figures based on the artist Keith Haring. The figures are simplified bodies that are in a dancing motion. The students started the lesson by dancing to get the motions just right. They drew and cut out a large, dancing paper figure, traced it, and cut out a second. The two figures are joined together by staples, adding a little bit of stuffing inside to make it look like a flat pillow. We glued a rulter at the base so the figures looks like a giant dancing lollipop. The students are now busy painting these figures with colorful patterns and shapes. We hope to make these figures into a "Sharpening the Saw" sculpture to display in the school building for Leadership Day. I'm thinking of creating a wire tower that the figures can be placed into using the stick to hold it in place. That idea is in the planning stage... stay tuned.