A giant-sized brown shoe with a leather shoelace and a bright red chimney covers an entire table in Nancy Datro's art classroom at the Brockport Hill Elementary School. The "shoe" was created by five fifth-grade students as part of the Better Contractors Bureau (BCB) "Houses on Parade" project. Students started the project in December, brainstorming how to turn a pre-built, two-story wooden house, provided by the BCB, into a creation all their own. Their first order of business was to come up with a theme. After deciding on a theme based on the nursery rhyme "The Old Lady in the Shoe," production got under way. For six weeks, students worked on their house three times a week for 40-minutes each. They added a yard with some trees and some figurines made out of Plasticene (a plastic substitute for modeling clay). According to fifth-grader Sarah Grande, her favorite part of the project was slopping on the goopy glue for the paper-maché shoe. "It was amazing to see the house transform from a plain structure into a shoe out of a nursery rhyme we all know," said Datro. "It was a great learning experience for them and it fit perfectly with the NYS Learning Standards for art. Students showed a lot of creativity and used many different art materials and resources." Datro gives all the credit to the students. The contest rules called for minimal adult direction, so Datro made sure to let the students do all the planning. "I just kept them on task and they did all the rest. They should really be proud of their work," she said. |
