Quilting
Bowe Elementary School, Chicopee
Artist Cindi Huss worked with three 3rd grade classrooms once a week for 8 weeks, each class lasting 1 hour. She is an instructor at the Fiber Art Center in Amherst where she has taught quilting since 2001. The students worked together to design and create a group project, based on their perception of “community,” which was displayed in the school. Individual projects included: designing Hawaiian appliqué quilt blocks; dyeing and painting paper and fabric; creating fabric collage, self-portraits in fiber; and shadow appliqué. The students kept some of their individual work, while some of it was incorporated into the group project.
Hip-hop
Salemwood K-8 School, Malden
40 students attended this class for three 2-hours sessions, which was taught by one of the Salemwood’s Americorps Teaching Fellows who had an interest in hip-hop and its culture. The Salemwood, through their partnership with Citizen Schools, has four Teaching Fellows that work on enrichment activities and academic support throughout the expanded school day and then lead an after-school program that begins after the expanded day ends. This class explored the history and culture of hip-hop, and students analyzed lyrics of hip-hop songs and their meaning. Students learned the different varieties and how to identify them. As a final project, students wrote their own lyrics using a variety of the hip-hop styles they had learned.
Screamers
Silvia Elementary School, Fall River
This elective, offered to 4th and 5th graders, met once a week for one hour over the course of 10 weeks. The 15 students worked in teams of two and three to design and build “Screamers”, which are large, three-dimensional monster sculptures. Teams of students worked together to sketch and design their screamers. Once the design was complete, each team built their full-size Screamer out of wire, cloth, and papier mache. Each screamer then was painted and decorated. Once the Screames were finished, they were put on display for the school community. This course, like all of the Silvia School’s enrichment classes, was conceived and taught by a Silvia teacher. The 60 minute enrichment block – which is 15 minutes longer than the class periods before ELT implementation – allowed for this creative, labor intensive (and sometimes messy!) project.
