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Students learn to write through art making

By Natalie Bruzda nbruzda@heraldstandard.Com 4 min read
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Amanda Steen | Herald-Standard

Elijah Curry-Jones examines the line of string he made as part of a collaborative art project in his third-grade class at Lafayette Elementary in the Uniontown Area School District. The project is part of a Gateway to the Arts program that was made possible through a Benedum Foundation grant.

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Keneya Johnson (left) and Ladonn Stone make a chandelier in their third-grade class at Lafayette Elementary School in the Uniontown Area School District. The project is part of a Gateway to the Arts program that was made possible through a Benedum Foundation grant.

Amanda Steen |

Herald-Standard

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Amanda Steen | Herald-Standard

Ta’Lynn Fairfax helps craft a chandelier in her third-grade class at Lafayette Elementary in Uniontown.

The classroom was buzzing with excitement.

Students in Angela Miller’s third-grade class at Lafayette Elementary were cutting shapes, and threading needles to complete another step of a collaborative art project.

“Art is something they really enjoy, and some of them have a limited experience with it,” Miller said. “They’re having fun while they’re learning, and it’s also a challenge.”

Using alpaca wool from 84 Alpacas, the students are creating a chandelier for their classroom.

Gateway to the Arts, an arts education/arts integration nonprofit based in Pittsburgh, has been working with the students since October.

Emma Davidson, an artist with Touchstone Center for Crafts, and Lisa Leibering, manager of school and community programs for Gateway to the Arts, have headed up the residency at Lafayette.

Each week, they complete one step of the process.

“It’s been really wonderful,” Leibering said. “We’re not in any way replacing their arts specialist, but we hope we are supplementing the arts program at the school. We’re working to create a school climate where arts are embraced throughout the curriculum and seen as being as much as part of the education process as the textbook is — not just a class they get to have once in a while.”

Miller is using the art project to supplement her lessons in process writing. The students are required to meet standards in process writing this year as part of the Common Core.

“The kids are not just doing worksheets and lecture-style lessons,” Miller said. “This gives them more of a hands on experience, because writing is an area we’d really like to improve. Writing is an area that we really have been struggling with especially with the new Common Core. The standards are a little bit tougher, and third grade is their first experience with writing on a standardized test. They’re used to journal writing correcting sentences, but not necessarily writing a paragraph in regard to a prompt.”

According to 2013-14 school performance profile data, Lafayette Elementary earned a writing score of 57.14. Although below the 70-point benchmark set by the state, the students improved by more than 20 points over the 2012-13 score.

“We’re providing the students with a new way of engaging with this content area through art making,” Leibering said. “Our goal is to create an environment for active, engaged learning to take place. They’ll take something they’ve actually done in the classroom and translate that into academic progress.”

Instead of a student thinking about and imagining the process of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, he can use his art making experience as the catalyst for his writing.

“Sometimes when students are writing, especially informational writing, they cannot process the steps correctly,” Miller said. “You may get something back where the steps are out of order, or they’ll have missing steps. So this gives them the hands-on experience of making something, and then they get to teach someone how to do it.”

The students started their art program by watching a video of a working alpaca farm.

“We always look for different local businesses or entities we can collaborate with,” Leibering said. “We wanted them to first understand the process of how we came to have this product that we’re now working with.”

The students moved on to wet felting, where they worked with wool and rolled it into balls. This week, the students used the wool balls to create chandelier strings.

“It really helps them because at this level, they’re crossing over between being able to process things that are concrete to abstract,” Miller said. “Some of them are still in that concrete mode of thinking, and without that concrete experience, they struggle a lot. So for those who are not yet thinking abstractly, this project has given them that extra little push.”

Students will have their final session on Dec. 11. However, on Dec. 16, the students will set up art making stations for the Family Fine Arts night to create art with their parents.

“Bringing in an arts program can really be a great thing, especially for students who have very low self-esteem and low self-worth,” Leibering said. “Arts can be very wonderful and empowering in that way.”

The Gateway to the Arts’ residency at Lafayette Elementary was made possible through a Benedum Foundation grant.

“For some of these students it’s their first rigorous experience of creating something,” Leibering said. “It’s very transformative for a child to say, ‘I have made something with my hands.'”

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