Several grades cooperate to produce quilt

COURTESY
WEATHERSFIELD, Vt. — Giving, kindness, generosity. These are words that are familiar in the recent season of Thanksgiving. Weaving these concepts into the curriculum and life at a school can be a challenge. That is where Weathersfield School has done an amazing job helping their students. There is a Kindness Club that meets weekly in the school that encourages students to be kind. Weathersfield also includes the community in so many different functions that the school puts on. This school theme spilled over into the art room as well.

Kindness. The challenge of giving of oneself to others. Art class took on this challenge in an unique way to include residents of the community. The art room has been blessed this year, with generous people who have donated miscellaneous supplies to the school, giving the long term substitute art teacher, Shelly Jarvis, an exciting challenge to incorporate the supplies into the curriculum. It was that giving of a bag of half-inch wooden blocks that inspired The African Inspired Art Quilts. The fourth grade started this project, but was quickly realized that other classes could join in for a larger school event. In the end the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, and a few teachers who got into the project as well, worked in this small scale.

“The students did an incredible job with this project,” said Jarvis of her students, “to watch them turn the stamp that they created in different ways and come up with different designs, challenged the way students looked at creating art.”

After studying many different traditional patterns that the Ashanti people in Ghana create, students created their own interpretation of these designs that were stamped on small 4 x 4 inch paper. They could have stopped right there.

“I liked the designs that everybody got to make. That everyone’s was different,” Madeline Hill, an eighth grade student, said.

“It was fun and creative,” Cooper Merlau, an eighth grade student, said

Designs done, up on the bulletin board.

The students then took their designs a step further and printed on strips of fabric. These reminded them of the photos that were looked at during the introduction of the project. These strips of fabric were then sewn together alongside fabric from Africa, to create the four lap size quilts. During the fourth grade year, the students visit Cedar Hill Nursing home, spending time celebrating holidays with the elderly in our community. Now, on Dec. 14, the students will have the joy of presenting to Cedar Hill, the lap quilts that so many hands helped to create.

“I think it was cool that so many grades were included,” said Skylar Thibodeau an eighth grade student.

Our school, our community. Bringing both together to encourage the joy of the season, and learning more about kindness and giving that connects us all together