art

Print / C is for Color

Over the last decade, the amount of elementary schools in America without a visual arts program has risen to almost twenty percent.

I’m here to declare that 20% too much.

When my son started school this year he immediately fell in love with his music teacher. The following week, he told me she was also his art teacher. On parents night, he couldn’t wait to take me to her room to meet her; in a small space behind the stage in the school cafeteria.

In this makeshift classroom she has managed to create a place for everyone to call their own. A getaway full of fun and excitement and sounds and color – it’s a welcome reprieve from the desks they are used to, and it is here in this space behind the curtain she teaches a school full of students both music AND art.

These children are flourishing under her supervision and haven’t a clue that the school’s budget for art isn’t what it used to be. They will never know … because she makes the most of her time with those children and the resources she has available to her.

I now love this woman just as much, if not more, than my son.

………………………………

Blick Art Materials and The Motherhood have teamed up with 50 teachers and 50 bloggers to fund classroom projects all over the country.

Can you guess who one of those teachers and one of those bloggers might be?!?!?!

In 2009, Blick Art Materials started Art Room Aid as a way for teachers to submit projects and wish lists on their site and give them the tools they needed to help raise money for them. Any teacher can create a project of their own, you can start one of your own right here, right now.

Our Art Room Aid project will be to create a school-wide hallway gallery for the students artwork. They will design their masterpieces first, then recreate them on canvas for the school. They already have so many great projects and murals on display in the school, I just know the kids will love seeing their own individual pieces hanging in the hallways.

Here’s our current wish list.

Blick Art Materials is giving us $100 towards our project and we’d love your help raising the rest. If you can’t donate, please share this post in hopes it may find it’s way to someone who can.

It’s programs like Art Room Aid and teachers like Mrs Deane who go the extra mile … and even parents like you, who are willing to contribute time, money and materials to help make sure there is room for art in the classroom, that will become a catalyst for change.

Let’s start right now.

From the bottom of my heart,

Thanks!

{ 1 comment }