Shape of Life in Art and Science

Recently, one of the Grade 4 science classes had a wonderful opportunity to go up to the high school and visit with one of Jenny Thomas'  art classes.   

It all started with an email message that I received from Jenny Thomas in the high school art department.  She wrote "Jodi Warren was showing some prospective parents through the art studios today and noticed I had dozens of jars of preserved animals from the science department in the classroom for students to draw. In fact we are doing huge, A1 size wax and ink drawings. She told me about the spider drawings you were doing with your grade 4 class and I got quite excited that just by chance we might try to do some kind of sharing activity or even just an observation with our high school and lower school children."

We are at a very exciting time at the moment, with students adding coloured inks to the wax crayon and watching the wax repel the liquid whilst making the huge drawings come alive."

I wrote her back immediately and said that I would love to bring my students up to visit her class. "We are focused on invertebrates at the moment - both molluscs and arthropods (insects/spiders vs. snails) - so they would be very interested in learning about how you and your students are using symmetry in your work - as well as the techniques that you are using in your wax/ink drawings."

So, the next morning we went up to visit and see what was happening in HS art.   We discovered that Ms. Thomas' students were closely observing several of the same animals that we had been studying in the last month.   We had a wonderful time and we are hoping that we can have some more visits in the coming months.  We would love to have the HS art students come down to our lower school science room and help us observe and draw some of the animals we have been studying.   The lower school science room has most of live critters in the school so we have a great resource to share with the art students as well.