Creek and Dry Creek Elementary School are building a collaborative partnership to encourage creativity. Second graders created drawings that were then passed on to the high school’s ceramics and creative writing classes.
The collaboration is a way for young students to see their imaginations come to life.
“I can imagine how excited these second graders are,” creative writing teacher Marissa Voss said. “When you’re in second grade, you think a senior in high school is so big, and they’re thrilled to have this kind of collaboration where they were in the driver’s seat and turned something over to someone older.”
The collaboration began earlier this year when elementary students created original pieces of art where their minds were able to run wild. Their teacher then interviewed them on what their character may like and what their hobbies are, so that the high schoolers had something to go off of. Through the collaboration, the elementary schoolers were able to showcase their voice.
Second grader Carissa Gubler said she “thought about candy, and then [she] wanted to make something about candy, because [she likes] chocolate.”
The partnership stemmed from a conversation that ceramics teacher Efong Yee had with the second-grade teacher Sarah Glennon from Dry Creek Elementary, who had seen similar collaborations done at another school on the Today Show.
However, the primary challenge was the fact that the second graders and the high schoolers were never in the same room. The only thing that helped the high schoolers better imagine the art were some questions that their teacher asked them.
“It was creative, it was fun, and it feels like a collaboration, even though there was never a conversation that took place,” Voss said.
The biggest challenge? Balancing creative freedom with the young artists’ original backstories. Many high schoolers felt an invisible pressure to make their projects align with the students’ vision; they were afraid to disappoint the second grader. They were worried about creating something that made the kid feel like they had no say about their original art.
“I would say that my students were most concerned with staying true to the original artwork and making sure that they were honoring the back story,” Voss said.
Not only that, but the creative writing students had to change their frame of mind for this project. They didn’t have that full set of creative freedom they were used to. They had to, for the first time, step into a second-grader’s pair of shoes so that the story had a full picture.
“We talked a lot about knowing your audience. So we tried to get back into that second-grade, space of mind,” Voss said. “Some students wanted to be funny, which I thought was great because I think there is this lightness to being in second grade.”
That’s the type of thought process that went into creating the original piece of art, so students had to change their perspective and writing style.
However, in the high-school level ceramics class, students use more technical methods in order to sculpt their creations, making it almost impossible to sculpt something that was either too delicate or too top-heavy. Students didn’t want the sculpture to become something that it wasn’t, potentially altering the original idea from the second grader’s vision.
Now that the teachers and the students are feeling good about their projects, the collaboration is planned to continue and get better for next year. “We’ve had to come up with some really creative ways of getting them to be stable and stay as original to the drawing as possible,” Yee said.
