Ambitious Artists Seeking True Cultural Perception
My students need various colors of easy to cut fabric they can sew or glue, decorated paper that comes in unique designs, and brush-on glue to create Peruvian textiles.
Have you had the opportunity to visit the traditional villages of Peru, Panama, Venezuela, or other South American countries? Well, neither have we! These lands have a rich history of traditional works of art and my students enjoy discovering, understanding, and being exposed to these art cultures.
My students and their parents face a number of challenges including poverty, language barriers, and reading illiteracy and 98% of our school population qualifies for the Federal Free or Reduced Lunch Program.
Because of these challenges it has become more difficult for a parent to instill pride and self-worth in their child's life. We have a diverse population of students, as more than 15 different languages and dialects are spoken in our school! We like to consider ourselves the United Nations of our school district and we wish to continue to celebrate this diversity and plant seeds for understanding and acceptance of every child.
My Project
Each year I seek to expose my students to a different culture through the arts. This year we are studying Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean Islands. My students will learn about texture and space in artworks as they study Peruvian textiles. We will look at and discuss traditional weaving art forms created by Peruvian villagers. Then students will apply their learning to an individual textile composition. My students will need various types of paper and cloth they can cut, glue, and sew. I am requesting Smart Fab, a non-woven fabric that can be easily used as cloth for sewing, along with a variety of specialty papers that can be cut and glued. They will use these materials to create landscape stories similar to those of the Peruvian villagers. I seek to use art as a way of inspiring creativity in the minds of students who are confined to classrooms full of testing each and every day. Providing them with the opportunity to study other cultures allows creativity to grow!
My school district has made a commitment to insuring that art remains in all elementary schools in our district.
With this commitment I feel that I have the support to provide artistic freedom in my classroom. I am not afraid to expose my students to photography, paint, clay, plaster, or printmaking. At the same time I look to bring the art world to the classroom because I know that these opportunities do not come often for them anywhere else.
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