Classroom Project

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I teach visual arts Kindergarten through 5th grade and two special needs classes. Our School is located on the urban fringe of a large city. It has 49% free lunch and 9% reduced. It's ethnicity is 68% White, 13% Hispanic, 5% Asian and 6% black and 7% Multi-... " MORE

I teach visual arts Kindergarten through 5th grade and two special needs classes. Our School is located on the urban fringe of a large city. It has 49% free lunch and 9% reduced. It's ethnicity is 68% White, 13% Hispanic, 5% Asian and 6% black and 7% Multi-racial. Our special focus is to improve literacy amongst all of our students.

Our students must raise their language arts test scores and improve their literacy so that our school can meet AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) and so they will have the educational skills necessary to get through life. Many are not meeting their potential.

Our students need to become excited about literacy in order to perform at a higher level to raise their test scores. To motivate students' interests in reading, writing and communication and, since cartooning is something all of our students enjoy, my plan is to use cartooning as a catalyst to motivate our students to produce creative works that incorporate and combine art, which they enjoy, with literacy skills and to utilize their creative and critical thinking skills to do the work. Story telling through drawing taps into the imaginations of children and sparks excitement about thinking about and performing detailed tasks in literacy.

Each student (over 500) in our school will be provided a tool, a sketch book for ongoing creativity. Professional cartoon artists will actually be brought into the classroom, the creative workspace, to work with our students during art classes and guide them through the process developing a cartoon character and storyline using the students' drawing and literacy skills. State standards in Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking and Visual Arts will be met at each grade level through the Cartoon Express Visiting Artist Program.

This program and idea is so unique and so new and special it will be groundbreaking. It will speak to each of my 500 students as a new way to express themselves, think critically and creatively and to become better communicators through literacy and art. This program, which integrates art with literacy, is a new way to get through to students and it will make a positive difference in their performance in literacy. This event will be well-documented for future reference and will be ongoing and self-sustaining because students will learn how to use their new educational tool, the sketchbook, to combine drawing and literacy for their future endeavors.

My students need a visiting artist from Cartoon Express and sketchpads for drawing and literacy.