Let's Get Weaving ... Looming Large In Fourth Grade!!!
My students need a variety of looms, including finger looms and Indian flat looms, with a supply of yarn.
FULLY FUNDED! Ms. Morris's classroom raised $681
This project is fully funded
First the bad news … my delightful Bay Area charter school no longer has funding for its specialized Art Program, and this year the Art curriculum has been thrown back to the teachers! This is both a challenge and an opportunity. When I learned that Art was now on my shoulders (and, quite frankly, beginning to panic a little) like the good little teacher I am (!), I went straight to the State Standards. Imagine my excitement when I saw that WEAVING is a set standard in Fourth Grade. Now, I’m no fine artist, but I LOVE to teach and learn skills and impart expertise ... so ... WEAVING it is!
Our school is home to a population of truly diverse learners. The school community works extremely hard to make our meager monetary resources go as far as is humanly possible, but (perhaps inevitably) once the necessities are covered, there simply isn’t any “extra” money to go around. The cancellation of funding for our Art teacher has hit us fairly hard, and we are now scraping around trying our best to gather materials together for a curriculum area that is purely hands-on and by its very nature uses up supplies as it goes. With your financial support, I will be able to concentrate my energy on planning and delivering an excellent, multi-culturally enriched Art program, rather than worrying where my next ball of yarn might come from.
One of the best things about weaving is that it lends itself so naturally to understanding the historical contributions and cultural dimensions of the visual arts. Through studying weaving, we will not only be applying artistic processes and skills, but also analyzing the role and development of the visual arts in past and present cultures throughout the world, noting human diversity as it relates to the visual arts and artists. Weaving (if you’ll excuse the pun) truly is the thread that binds many and diverse cultures over time and space. So ... it’s cross-curricular, it’s multi-cultural, it’s PERFECT! Yippee!!!
We have got off to a reasonable start – we have woven paper and “spun” a web to accompany our studies of ‘Charlotte’s Web’, but it’s high time I moved away from paper plates, cardboard, and string and tackled something more authentic. We know the language of the warp and the weft, but to truly explore this media we need some “official” resources.
So, the good news (finally, the good news!) is that I’m very excited about the Art program in my class this year – all I need is the right person to step up and answer my call for funding. As you have stuck with me and read this proposal thus far, I’m hoping that person might be YOU!
It would be so lovely for me (and the children, of course) to have the opportunity to experience authentic weaving materials in a hands-on, investigative, exploratory way. I have a whole class of "hands-on" kinds of learners and I'd love to nurture that learning style when we study Native Americans, the Pioneers, and the artistic legacy of other countries and cultures.
So much in our current ways of living is “instant”; it would be genuinely refreshing for the children to be creative in the more measured and deliberate context of weaving. I wish you could have seen my class when they wove paper at the beginning of the year. We took a picture of ourselves and wove it together with a photograph of a flower. The resulting artwork accompanied a poem the children had written about themselves and it was stunning – the children were so-o-o proud of themselves and their achievement. The product was delightful, but more importantly the process was just incredible to witness. The children had to work slowly and thoughtfully with a huge amount of consideration for their work as they went along. As a group, their focus was amazing – in fact, I’d go as far as to say that weaving is a therapeutic process and a wonderful antidote to today’s faster paced living and the constant drive to be looking out for “the next thing”.
My class motto this year is, “Non Scholae Sed Vitae Discimus” – meaning that we do not learn for school, but for life – our proposed weaving and textiles art unit would exemplify this idea(l) perfectly. I sincerely hope I have “sold” my idea to you and perhaps inspired you to fund this program of study. Funding this project is a way for you to directly “touch” real children in real need. They say that teachers “touch the future”, without people like you, we can’t always reach that far.
Wish me luck!
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