A Study of Chihuly and His Art: How We Covered Academic Standards and More Through Interest Based Learning

It all started when I showed the kids pictures of my trip to Columbus to see the Chihuly Exhibit! 

They oooo’d and awed after every picture and started asking questions right away! When they found out he made everything out of glass they were amazed and had even more questions! I also showed them a picture of this famous artist.

Here are some of their wonders:

Then I planned. What standards could I cover through this interest? I usually use a web map to figure it out.

A Lesson in Perseverance: 

We went to YouTube to watch Dale Chihuly explain what’s glass is made of and how he creates his sculptures and paintings. We learned how he hurt his eye in an accident and then his arm surfing so that he could no longer lift the heavy pipes and blow the molten hot glass without being a danger to himself and others. Here is where the most important lesson came from and the kids really took this in...Rather than giving up what he loved to do most, Chihuly problem solved. He went to his friends and created a team that could create his designs for him. Creating a team from their friends is something these kids have learned to do in our class when they can’t solve a problem themselves so they really could relate with him over this!

A Lesson in Seeing the Bright Side:

Chihuly used to sketch his designs but after his accidents started painting designs creating beautiful abstract paintings! He may have never started painting if he hadn’t hurt his eye or his arm. The kids watched him and saw how much fun he had squirting paint and what freedom he had with his art! They loved creating abstracts at our easel! 

They loved his Macchia sculptures! Macchia means “spot” in Italian! They created their own Macchia decorating coffee filters with Crayola markers, putting over a cup and spraying them with starch. The starch made the colors blend and helped it hold their shape. They turned out beautiful!

They were also interested in Chihuly’s Rotolos! Rotolo means “coil” in Italian.

This little friend started the trend then others decided to make one too!

Math was incorporated through the 3D shapes Chihuly used in his art. We discussed the difference between sculptures which are 3D and solid and paintings which are 2D and flat.  They found both 3D and 2D shapes in his sculptures and paintings. Chihuly made these beautiful cylinders out of glass that inspired some friends to create their own using cardboard tubes paint, glitter and colored cellophane!

For literacy, the kids wrote an opinion piece about which Chihuly sculpture they thought was the best. 

They also learned what a biography was and wrote one about Chihuly by writing something they now knew about him that was a fact.

In Science we learned about the properties of objects and sorted by those properties. 

They created transparent and translucent art inspired by Chihuly’s paintings that we hung in the window to see how the light shown through and explored transparency, translucency and opaqueness on our overhead projector that we also use as a light table. 

Here is our display documenting what we learned! 













It is amazing how much of the standards can be taught and practiced through following the students interests! Because they are interested it doesn’t even feel like work to them! But they also worked on those important life skills they need to be successful: Critical and creative thinking, problem solving, collaboration/teamwork, perseverance when things get hard or don’t work as planned. During this study, they used every single one of these life skills! Now to see what they choose to dive into next! 

The KINDergarten Kindness Ninjas of West Carrollton

We were invited to be Kindness Ninjas by Joys of Kinder up in Canada who started the Kindness Ninja movement! Check out www.kindnessninjasrvs.com to see their mission! They sent us a Kindness Ninja kit including a Kindness Ninja Master, red ninja headbands, a pledge for us to say, a plaque for us to make our mark on as a pledge, and a book made by her class about different ways to show kindness!

We read many books about kindness! Here are some of our favorites! 

We took the pledge and took our mission to change the world through Random Acts of Kindness (RAK’s) very seriously! We started out by making signs to help spread the message of kindness throughout our school. 

We RAK’d Miss. S’s class by sneaking into their room and leaving hearts for each student with a message telling them they were special.

We RAK’d the whole upstairs Kindergarten by sneaking little pumpkins into empty classrooms and in the kids cubbies for Halloween. 

We RAK’d Mrs. Thompson’s class by leaving pencils with flag toppers that said, “Kindness Matters” on their desks.

We left notes saying they were RAK’d by the Kindness Ninjas and now it was their turn to spread kindness around and change the world. We did this all anonymously and snuck into the rooms hoping no one would find out our secret identities! It was all about doing the Random Acts of Kindness without expecting anything back in return. It showed the kids that giving is even better and more joyous than receiving!

We started thinking about how we could show kindness to our community. Homelessness had come up in conversations as people who need help and we listed what their needs would be. 100 Day was coming up so we challenged ourselves to collect 100 toiletries like shampoo, soap, deodorant, toothbrushes, toothpaste, etc. The kids ended up collecting 332 items! 

The kids put them in groups of ten to figure out how many items we had. Next, they sorted them by type of item. 

They put the different groups into boxes and then labeled the boxes. 

We all felt that those who were going through homelessness needed some kind words of encouragement so for 100 Day we set out to write 100 notes of encouragement for the West Carrollton Food Bank to pass out to those in need. 

The last thing to do is for me and Mr. Myers to deliver everything which we will do later this week! This was such a labor of love and the Kindness Ninjas are not finished. Their concern for those going through homelessness continues. They are very concerned about them sleeping on the hard ground and being cold so we are exploring avenues to see how we can help with this. They are also very concerned about homeless animals so we will see where that takes us! One thing this whole experience has thought me is that young children have big hearts and are capable of doing great things! They CAN change the world and have already gotten a good start at changing the world one kind act at a time! ❤️

Through this problem-based learning project, skills we have been learning about in Math, Reading, Writing, Social Studies and Science were all being used. Because they were being used authentically, the kids never even realized they were practicing any of these skills.  They just used the skills because they needed to...and because they needed to, they wanted to. This is why problem based, inquiry based, project based and play based learning work so well. They actually apply the skills they learn and see the need for them as they use them.