One thing I believe is that we’re all beautiful. I want to help my students believe the same thing, and celebrate diversity. One way we began to do this is to read books about the ways we are all beautiful and then create art to showcase that–art that will hang in our room all year to help us remember. 🙂
Last week we read the book The Skin You Live In, by Michael Taylor. It is written in the form of a poem, so it sounds good, but the point of the story is that our skin is something to celebrate and appreciate. The pictures are really great, and everyone loved reading it!
(photo courtesy of goodreads.com)
After we read it, we talked about the beautiful skin that we live in in our class, and started a project to create portraits of ourselves. I have done this many times with classes, and sometimes there’s paint involved, sometimes markers, sometimes colored pencils. This time is was colored pencils, along with yarn, fabric, string and glue. 🙂
I was so impressed at how diligently everyone worked to make it both creative and authentic to themselves.
Look! We got to practice our cutting skills with this project.
I love that we have so many adult helpers at our school to support us! Mrs. Gaglio is helping Makayla create her portrait. 🙂
We also got to practice our gluing skills.
I had to highlight Ava and the way she masterfully demonstrated her understanding of using “just a dot, not alot.”
Here Diego is helping Briannia figure out how to make the cloth look like her clothes. He figured out how to solve the problem, and is showing her how to sketch the shape of her shirt before she cuts the fabric. I love how projects like this have opportunities to work both alone and with our classmates, sharing our knowledge and teaching each other. This picture exemplifies the phrase I love–everyone is a student and everyone is a teacher.
I just had to take a picture of this part of our rug as we worked. Learning is messy, friends! (Don’t worry–they know how to respect our environment and they picked it all up!).
We had just the right spot to hang them so they can smile down on us all year! 🙂 There are a few friends who aren’t finished yet, and theirs will fill that hole by the clock when they’re done.
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