A crudely-formed bird (airplane?) mosaic, photographed from the school roof

Last week, after many delays, I was able to get down to the school in Tacacorí and take photos of all the CUBs rocks that the students had painted. I used my camera (rather than my phone) and a borrowed tripod so that the pictures would be better quality and also more standardized. The result was 146 photos of rocks. I don’t know the exact number of students at the school, but I know that fifth-graders in particular were impatient to take their rocks home before I photographed them, because there were only a handful of specimens left last week.

Unfortunately for those students who didn’t wait until I told them they could take their rocks home, their artwork won’t be entered in the impromptu art contest, which will be loosely modeled on the Project FeederWatch BirdSpotter Challenge in that there will be one winner by popular vote and another by a panel of judges (me). Since there were so few fifth-grader “submissions” I chose two winners outright, which are above.

Instead of having two winners per week, we will have two winners per grade, with the exception of 6th grade where the amount of students and quality of work merits four winners. Sixth-graders are also the students who will soon be graduating to a higher level of schooling, and it would be great to encourage art as strongly as possible among them.

From the 15-30 rocks per grade, I have nominated five, and for the sixth-graders I have nominated ten. The first-grade nominees are above. If you place your cursor over or click on the images, you’ll see the title “Nominee X.Y,” where X stands for the grade and Y for the entry number. If you’d like to participate in the competition, you can comment on this post with one vote per grade (except fifth, since I have the two winners above). I’ll tally up those votes along with those of the Xandari employees who wish to participate on paper here at the Resort, and post the results a few days after the voting closes at 11:59PM EST, November 24th! The second grade nominees are next:

Try to keep in mind the creativity of some of these designs in addition to the simple aesthetics of each piece! I’ll try to balance out the second winner with whatever “the people’s choice” is. Here are the third-graders:

Fourth grade also had a lot of talent, and their nominees are below:

Finally, the ten sixth grade nominees are in the slideshow. I hope you enjoyed the artwork created by Tacacorí’s very own Celebrate Urban Birds participants! And thank you for voting before midnight (Eastern Standard Time) next Monday!

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I almost forgot to mention what the prizes will be: for now I’m thinking each winner will receive a painting kit, and the single rock-painter that receives the most overall votes will get an extra-fancy painting kit! If you have other recommendations, please post them in the comments section!