Twins Lou and Evelyn Bohannon show off samples of their work at the kindergarten art exhibition. All photos courtesy of Angela Dittmar/Arts-Based Collaborative.
Are kindergarteners too far from college to be considered prospective university students?
Not to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Arts-Based Collaborative and a local elementary school.
The Arts-Based Collaborative, a center within the College of Health, Education and Professional Studies, facilitates arts-based professional learning programs that support various needs across multiple fields and disciplines.
Over this academic year, the center has participated in a community engagement project with kindergarten educators at Montessori Elementary at Highland Park to develop and co-teach programming in the fall and spring. Called the Visual Arts Integration Residency, the project culminated with an art exhibition at the elementary school in April.
Montessori Elementary at Highland Park, which opened in August 2021, has five teachers for its 72 kindergarten students.
“This was a really robust project with two different curricular units,” said Angela Dittmar, the Arts-Based Collaborative’s director of Teaching Artist Residences. “Both units took place over the course of two to three weeks and we spent all day there, with the kindergartners coming through in rotations.
“It was my first time in this capacity working with 20-plus kindergartners at a time to accomplish project-based learning goals. It was such a delightful, challenging and inspiring experience.”
Dittmar said that one of the Montessori teachers, Aleece Crank, had landed a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission; in turn, Crank used that grant to commission the Arts-Based Collaborative for an arts integration project for the young students.
“She had been already aware of the Arts-Based Collaborative because she previously participated in a UTC-Wolf Trap classroom residency with one of our teaching artists,” Dittmar explained, “and she wanted to continue building her teaching toolkit in arts integration through visual arts.”
UTC-Wolf Trap is the first university-named affiliate program of the nationally renowned Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts.
“We met with all of the kindergarten teachers,” she continued, “and designed the program so that it would integrate November curriculum and March curriculum with the idea of culminating with an April family art show.”
Kindergartener Brianna Johnson proudly displays her medallion.
Dittmar, along with teaching artist assistants Mary Eliza Hendricks and Helia Quhite, constructed a literacy-based art integration project in the fall based on author Terri Cohlene’s “Dancing Drum: A Cherokee Legend.”
Dittmar said they focused on that story through drama, puppetry and props while also learning to make some of the pottery and art objects in the book. She cited the medallions Dancing Drum and others wore around their necks.
“We used that to build a visual connection of similarly shaped items with some of their forms for teaching geometry, pie divisions and circles through tracing little triangular pie shapes,” she explained.
The students also created medallions from air-dry clay and made pinch pot rattles and coil pots.
In March, the UTC group returned to Montessori Elementary for a second project integrating botany and habitat.
“In those sessions, the children made a journal out of folding paper, threading a pipe cleaner through it and having a cover,” Dittmar said. “This became their field notes journal. They became naturalists in this project.
“They practiced looking and learning about a plant each day, learning about the animal or insect relationships each plant has.”
The students used their field notes to draw pictures and record what they wanted to remember about each plant. They also created a large botany collage based on the style of well-known children’s author Eric Carle, creator of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”
“Eric Carle will produce these pieces of paper that have lots of textures, lots of different types of blue or green and shades,” she explained, “and that’s sort of what we did. And that took us a couple days; that was a big learning curve for these kindergartners.
“They learned how to use tape to create bubbles. They learned how to layer paper and cut out multiple sequences to narrow in on the more organic shapes of these plants. And then they pasted it together and drew the roots and the stems or added an insect. They got to demonstrate their knowledge of botany and plant anatomy.”
At the April exhibit, the children and their families got to see the artwork mounted on black backing on the Montessori Elementary walls thanks to the work of Dittmar’s Arts-Based Collaborative colleagues, Laurie Melnik Allen, Bill Floyd and Thaddeus Taylor. Collages, pottery and field journals were spread around for the parents to view.
It also gave them a chance to glimpse into the future.
“It is so important for us at UTC to work with kindergartners and early learners,” Dittmar said, “because we are setting them up early with this idea that UTC is part of their world and part of their lives.
“They see and have family members who have attended UTC and make those connections. Even if they’re kindergartners and college is so far off, they can start visualizing themselves someday being at UTC.”
(From left) Jenna Vandergriend, Liam Smith and Leo Smith
