Help me give my students and other third grade students at our school an opportunity to host a community fundraiser for New American Families in the Step (Study Toward English Proficiency) Program at our awesome public school!
I teach in an extremely diverse elementary school in Burlington, Vermont. The school is a Title One school and many of its students are displaced people (recent refugee immigrants). Our school is a magnet school and offers its students an interdisciplinary curriculum and a dynamic approach to learning where the arts are central to academics. Students actively create, communicate through and respond to their own and others work in the disciplines of visual arts, dance, music and theatre. The students are energetic and engaged in lessons and activities regularly throughout each school day.
My Project
For the past 10 years, the Integrated Arts Academy (IAA) in the Old North End of Burlington, VT has held an event at IAA in December called Fill the Bowl. Fill the Bowl is a community event and fundraiser for new American families to the IAA community. Our school is one hundred percent free or reduced price lunch. Forty-five different languages are spoken within the Burlington School District population. IAA has a twenty-four percent participation rate in the English Language Learners program. IAA has a diverse student body; fifty-four percent of the student body is Black, Asian, mixed-race or Hispanic. Fill the Bowl is a complex and partnership oriented event. It is planned and executed by the third grade teaching team, the arts coach, third grade students, families, as well as community partners, teaching artists and professional artists.
The process begins with IAA’s third grade students visiting Burlington City Arts (BCA) twice to hand-build and throw bowls on the wheel.
This rich experience, in a professional clay studio, is the heart of Fill the Bowl. The bowls are fired by the BCA teaching artists. Additionally, two professional ceramicists donate one hundred bowls for students to underglaze, then fire them. Student-created bowls are sold during the Fill the Bowl event. Local artists also donate artwork to be auctioned off at Fill the Bowl. Proceeds from the sale of student bowls and the auction go to New American families of children in the STEP (Study Toward English Proficiency) Program at IAA. The money we raise will go toward transportation to BCA, underglaze for "professionally wheel thrown bowls" that the students will decorate, kitchen service (one employee for the night of the event), butter, paper and plastic-ware, and t-shirts for the students to decorate and wear the night of the event.
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