Third-graders at Mills River Elementary sifted through piles of tissue paper, old book pages, magazine pages, and scrapbooking paper, looking for the perfect elements for their collages.
Throughout the month, M Rathsack, a local artist and owner of M’s School of Art, was teaching all grade levels how a picture of an owl, a cat, or a snake could be created using cut up pieces of paper – either solid or printed.
Rathsack has been visiting Mills River thanks to the Artists in the Schools program through The Arts Council of Henderson County, which puts local professional artists, actors, musicians, storytellers and dancers in classrooms to share their talents with students.
It’s the fourth year Rathsack has visited Mills River through the AIS program, and she said she tries to tailor each residency to what students are currently studying.
IMG_6649“She always does a different type of medium. It’s really neat,” said third grade teacher Erin Stachura. “They did pottery the first year, they did ink prints last year.”
This month, Rathsack said, every student’s collage is animal-based; 3rd-graders are using photographs of wild and domestic animals as bases for their collages, kindergarteners and 1st-graders are using pictures of fish for examples, and 4th- and 5th-graders are creating animal mash-ups – inspired by the book “Call Me Gorgeous!” by Giles Milton.
“I spend one day with each grade level,” Rathsack said.
As Rathsack pointed out the different shapes found in pictures of animals – the triangle-like quality of an owl’s beak, for instance – and encouraged students to describe what they saw in nature, Stachura was impressed by the different vocabulary words she worked into her lesson: “profile, fringe, iris, layering, background.”
Student teacher Tricia Haack from Mars Hill University said, “We noticed that some students don’t have the same frame of reference. But here, it’s all united.”
“That’s why art is so important,” Stachura said.
(Written by Molly McGowan Gorsuch, HCPS Public Information Officer.)