With over a week of working with other grades at the elementary school in Tacacorí, I’ve seen lots of really great paintings of birds on locally-found stones, and even one or two chunks of cement. After finding around seventy-odd rocks around Xandari that were mostly usable for this art project and scrubbing them all of mud and moss, I decided to assign bringing a rock to school as homework. I figured that even if half of the students forgot to bring a stone to work with, my significant stock-pile would be enough for grades 1-3 and 6, which I worked with last week.

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Apparently, many of the kids were excited enough about the project to remember to bring their rocks, because most of them did actually show up with stones to use and I only had to hand out rocks to a handful of students per class. As I knew from previous experience working with first- and second-graders, these classes were a little tougher to handle than third- through sixth-graders, but they were still manageable.

Third-grade work

The main issue was teaching certain students not to switch from one color to another without cleaning their paintbrush in the little cups of water I put at each table. With six colors per palette — red, black, blue, green, yellow, and white — made out of old ice-trays, many of the colors quickly became wasted mixes that nobody could use. The pieces of cardboard that I handed out as mixing palettes worked for some, but mostly with the older groups of students, whose work is in the slideshow above.

First- or second-grade work