6th-Grade Art from 20 Years Ago

Back when my daughter was in elementary school, I volunteered in her school from Kindergarten thru 6th grade. As a group project for her 6th-grade teacher, students did graphic designs of their future professions by painting with acrylics on muslin squares. My sister-in-law was kind enough to assemble the squares into a quilt using fabric in the school's colors to frame the designs. My daughter wanted to be a Disney Imagineer (top middle) at that moment in time.

Back then I was known for doing more complicated art projects than the average parent volunteer. This requires dedicated support from the classroom teacher.

We were always doing tissue paper collages in either warm or cool colors as simple backgrounds then finishing the project with something way more complicated and precise.

This was my crazy example of a stained-glass window project we did with the aid of coloring book pages containing animal drawings. This was my very first project about positive-negative space. I improvised by adding a human ear to the zebra's head, eyeglasses to the giraffe, and made the bird appear to be riding a broomstick instead or perching on a branch. I wish I had a smartphone then so that I could have preserved pics of the finished products.

I also had this other sample in cool colors of only the background. I kept it too and reused it later in my retirement for my Van Gogh (background) and Rockwell (foreground) perspective project for 5th-graders.

We also did a play about Lewis and Clark. I made a Saratoga trunk out of an old appliance box covered in wood grain contact paper.. The younger kids were so amazed when the play characters magically appeared to climb out of the trunk onto the stage.

Then in my retirement, the 5th-grade drama teacher assigned me a stage crew of 8 5th-grade students to manage the props and construct and paint 3 scenery panels to simulate the town of River City, Iowa, for their production of "The Music Man".

While I laid out the design of each panel and sketched it out, they did all the painting, including white-washing some lattice work to use for a gazebo and sponging on a brick pattern. The bunting came from the Dollar Store. We also made a mock-up for the opening train scene. Frankly, I didn't expect to be managing such a crew, but I had been their art teacher all year!