Artful Teaching Practices

The English classrooms at Montgomery Middle Steam Magnet are teeming with students making connections between academics and creativity. In Aimee Welshan’s 8th grade classroom, students have just completed an identity unit in which they analyzed a variety of texts, wrote analytical paragraphs, and created a Papel Picado representing symbols and colors that reflect their identity. Similarly, students in Patrick Meehan’s 7th grade classroom have just finished reading Touching Spirit Bear and are now working in the makerspace to design literal and symbolic representations of thematic ideas from the text which will be accompanied by an artistic statement that justifies their design decisions. This creativity is also reflected in Susan Corrigan’s 6th grade where students are just finishing writing a claim-based analytical paragraph about themselves using the I Am poem they composed for their Student Led Conferences. These are just a few examples of powerful ways students are making creative connections to their academics in everyday learning. Way to go, Montgomery teachers!