JCDS Art Department Goes Green
Each year in March, Youth Art Month celebrates children and their art across America. This year’s theme, “Going Green,” is so very appropriate for all of us here at JCDS as we began a “Green Team.” This group’s mission has been to raise awareness about the ways we can conserve our resources and initiate plans for recycling. It also created a forum where students and faculty alike can brainstorm, discuss, and work together. Plans began for ways to recycle disposable items like paper, plastic water bottles, plastic caps, biodegradable silverware, and to reuse water from plastic water bottles.
With all of this in mind, I set out this year to see how recycling and the creativity of children could team together. What a fantastic journey it has been for all of the students!
The sixth grade began to create decorative boxes from reused shoeboxes and recycled strips of bleeding tissue paper. These boxes were used as a service project for disabled veterans.
The fifth grade began to create robots from small boxes and discarded computer and electrical gadgets. The fifth grade was also responsible for a colorful lighted “Chihuly” tower that has graced the library for the past few months. With the surplus of plastic bottles, the students were able to make an additional flower or decoration for the winter holidays.
The fourth grade has been busy painting, decorating, and mounting tissue tubes into a freestanding sculpture. We studied balance and its importance in three-dimensional art. We will also create fish from recycled two liter plastic bottles in the spring.
The third grade has just completed a sculpture from painted scrap mat board, bottle caps, and other recycled materials. Fantastic figures and animals were created.
Students in the second grade classes will be using recycled construction paper to create a torn paper collage about butterflies. We will be study about symmetry and pattern.
Students from first grade that are on the “Green Team” wanted to create a grade level project using plastic bottle caps. Garden art sculpture was the theme selected and these beautiful creations will adorn the area outside of the art room in the Kelly Fine Arts building.
A teacher I met recently coined the following phrase that I would like for you to consider. “Saving our planet, one young artist at a time.” At JCDS we are trying to do just that.
—Shaw Lane
(posted 3/11/09)
