Arts Spotlight: Pollinator Paradise
Students and teachers were buzzing this year over the third grade’s new interdisciplinary service-learning curriculum, which focuses on the power of pollinators like bees, moths, butterflies, birds, wasps and small mammals. The new curriculum — which was supported by an Innovation Journey Fund grant that provided time for teachers to reimagine the third grade’s longtime sea turtle study project — emphasizes the role of pollinators in feeding the world; calls attention to the decline in the pollinator population; and offers ideas for supporting these critical species.
In conjunction with the new curriculum, Lower School art teacher Pamela McKenney led third-graders in an art project to highlight the beauty of pollinators. Students sketched their pollinators of choice — from dragonflies to butterflies and beetles — from photographs. They then traced their sketches onto linoleum plates, used carving tools to carve out their designs, and used the plates to make multiple prints using various colors of ink and paper. The striking results simply fly off the page.
