A few weeks ago, I was invited into my niece, Mia's 3rd grade class at Germantown Friends School. My brother and I attended GFS grades K-12 and my mom is still there teaching kindergarten. Now, my niece is learning in my old classrooms. She shared my children's book "Jaro and Frog" with her class and her teacher Andrea invited me in to help her students create a mural around their unit of study. Their big question is why do people move? Through this question, they have studied immigration and the Great Migration and all of the social issues that come with it. After discussing and brainstorming their research findings, they voted to decided which of their concepts are essential themes. They landed on: WHY people move, HOW people move and their HOPES for moving.
Being in Philadelphia, we are lucky to belong to a city with the nation's most murals. We spent time looking at some Philadelphia murals and breaking down the designs. Students noticed that there are multiple ideas in one mural, scenes can overlap each other, there can be abstract elements, the positioning of a person can show their emotion, and so on. With all of this in mind, they broke into groups to think of the best imagery and symbolism to include in their mural. I showed the student original artwork from my book which is a collage made from painted paper. In our first session, students dove in to prepare the paper for the collages. This was a complex project and they did an amazing job taking it step by step to build each piece by hand, communicate their ideas with their group, and adapting and problem solving to create these beautiful and powerful collages. I'm so happy I was able to collaborate with this class!
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AuthorKara Rutledge is an elementary art teacher in Philadelphia and recently earned her Masters in Art Education with an Emphasis on Special Populations from Moore College of Art and Design. Archives
September 2017
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