Franklin Middle School - Melodee Strong - 4 hrs
The kids at Franklin on their spring break! They have two weeks of break where teachers come in to the school building to catch up on grading and other responsibilities while the kids are out, and some students come back to school the following week for that Franklin called Spring Break Academy where teachers open their respective projects/classes for the week before official classes start. These include some classes where students need to come in and catch up on work from the semester's quarter. Melodee Strong opened a class for registration to paint a mural during spring break academy at Franklin. Since no students are allowed to be here this week we had an opportunity to start prepping the wall for the following week.
The wall we'll be painting next week with the kids will be in front of their media center! Ms. Strong and I taped off the edges of the walls we'll be painting and primed their surfaces. The walls take up about half of the hallway they're located in but are not terribly large. We finished prepping in four hours! I'm super excited for next week and helping kids invest their creativity into their school. Ms. Strong won't have the design for the images until next week when we'll most likely project it onto the walls and trace the design with black paint in order to make the painting process go by a bit faster. Ms. Strong also believes in having students contribute in all phases in mural painting, so she'll sit down with her kids next Monday and take their ideas and sketches and incorporate them into what she already has in mind.
I'm really excited for the physical creation of the mural as well as helping the kids with contributing. I'm also looking forward helping them next Friday, April 1st, when they take a trip out to MCAD and experience and see for themselves what art college looks like! I'll be giving a quick tour of the school to the kids and show them around the studios to let them see what people like myself mean when we say we go to an arts college.