French Coopération

So the word for collaboration and cooperation are the same in French and English! How wonderful because it was a collaberation in cooperation with my French teaching colleugue that happened this week. I finally got to put my big special project for the year, my painting and poster cart, out on a test drive!

First, let me introduce the new PAINTING and POSTER CART!

I am trying something new this year. Just imagine, another teacher assigns a poster project to their class, and suddenly all of their students are in need of art materials. In the past I would be bombarded with random requests for materials I don’t even keep. and as a result, a sheet of $4 bristol paper would be swiped as poster board! (ahhh!) But now I’ve created a cart especially for children who would like to make posters. Any kind of posters. Spanish posters, go team posters. It can also be used as a general use traveling paint cart.

The new painting and poster cart will be open to students anytime. I will also have tagboard AKA “poster board” available for students to use for class projects for $1 per sheet. I have also offered to wheel it down to my colleagues classrooms if they would like to borrow it for a class. I’m super excited about this. These are cheap, rough and ready art supplies that are not part of our precious classroom stash. And all washable! My hope is that I will have fewer damaged brushes, and wasted or misused $4 sheets of bristol. I can’t/don’t want to close the classroom to clubs and students who’d like to work on other class projects that involve art, BUT we lost a lot of brushes and very expensive sheets of paper to enthusiastic poster makers, who maybe weren’t familiar with the art room, last year. So fingers crossed this is a success!

And so I got my first request for the cart almost immediately after I announced it to my colleagues at the beginning of the school year. The first teachers to borrow it were actually our freshman physics teachers, but both them and I forgot to take photos so oh well. But soon after the French seminar class wanted finish up a unit on Impressionism and paint in class. The French teacher wanted each student to just do a quick one class project (our classes are 80 min) where they created quick paintings illustrating their understanding of impressionism and demonstrating the key characteristics of it’s style. I could not attend the class since it overlapped with one of mine, so I can’t speak to the instruction too much, but they turned out great! What sweet paintings, and a wonderful use of this new painting and poster cart.

I hope it gets much more use this year!