Norwood & Orems
Receive Grants From
Crayola & NAESP
- by Ben
Boehl
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Norwood
fifth-grader Samantha Harris shows off the outline of her project.
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Norwood
principal Pat Goldys and Orems Elementary School principal Marcia Wolf
are two of the 20 nationwide winners to receive Crayola and the
National Association of Elementary School Principals’ “Champion
Creatively Alive Children” school grant. Each school is awarded a
$3,000 grant ($2,500 monetary grant and $500 worth of Crayola products)
that encourages innovative arts-education projects at their schools and
share best practices for arts education with fellow educators.
At Norwood, Goldys is using the funds to establish a program at the
Dundalk school for art teacher Alison Paul. The art teacher has Norwood
students studying the work of Baltimore American Visionary Art Museum
artist Jennifer Strunge. Her fifth-grade students are creating original
“critters” from silk, which the students called stuffed monsters. This
project presents the challenge to students of hand-stitching their
characters.
“I thought at first the boys would have a difficult time with the
stitching, but they have taken off. They have created the names for the
characters and created the shapes,” Paul said.
After the stuffed monsters are created, the next step will be for
Paul’s students to design storylines for the creations that focus on
problem-solving themes. This will eventually lead to book illustrations
for their stories and study book binding techniques to create
collaborative storybooks. One of the main themes used is bullying. Paul
hopes to use a dialogue between a student’s monster and a friend’s
monster about bullying.
“Mrs. Paul is an outstanding teacher and has only been teaching for
four years. She understands kids need to do real life learning
projects,” Goldys noted. “She doesn’t just teach art. She incorporates
reading, writing and problem solving into the art projects.”
After the project is complete, it will be shared with patients at
University of Maryland Children’s Hospital in April. Paul only meets
with the fifth-graders once a week for 50 minutes, but plans to create
a DVD for the patients if there is enough time.
“The students are having a ball with the project. They know it is for
something good,” Paul explained.
Over at Orems in Middle River, the grant money is being used to help
each student create authored and illustrated books. “We hope to have
copies of the short stories to the library,” Wolf said.
In addition, each class will work as a whole to create a hardbound book
that will be available in the spring. Orems students work on the
projects during Grace Hulse’s art class. Hulse said the goal is to
integrate the school’s curriculum into this book project. She gave an
example of how fifth graders are studying Colonial Times and their
projects also focus on Colonial Times. Orems will use a portion of the
grant money to invite an artist to the school to train teachers on
electronic publishing. “We wouldn’t be able to do all of this if it
wasn’t for the grant,” Hulse added. Wolf agrees and is happy for the
gift from Crayola.
“It is an honor to be one of only 20 schools in the nation to be
selected for this grant,” Wolf said. “We try to give student
opportunities in other areas so we can enrich their lives and this
(grant) only enhances that opportunity.”
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