Collaboration Mural

The fruit of my labour!

I ended up teaching 2 and a half days last week. This project was a cross curricular Socials/ Fine Arts lesson where the students have been studying the United Nations and I was to introduce them to the Charter of Children's Rights.

First we read a page in their textbook that introduced the idea that children have specific rights and freedoms, why and when the Charter was created and then looked at a kid-friendly version of the actual document.

I then read "We Are All Born Free" to the students. This book was created by Amnesty International and is a collaboration of famous artists from around the world illustrating the Declaration of Human rights in the eyes of children. It is a beautiful compilation and the inspiration for the "FOR" assessment I used for this activity.

Collaboration Mural- Warning, it is a lot of prep! (but totally worth it)

First I typed the title of the book and the four categories of the Charter of Children's Rights into a word document, printed it, and divided it into 45 rectangles (9x5) to represent 45 pieces of paper. I then drew a line through each of the rectangles to create 90 sections and numbered them- one for each of my students.

 

 

Next I recreated this poster onto 45 pieces of paper. The model drawn on one piece of paper made it easy to understand what needed to be drawn on each section. I then cut each paper in half, just as I had with the sections in the model, gave one to each student and had them illustrate one of the articles in the Charter of Children's Rights to demonstrate what they look like- just as the artists had in "We Are All Born Free."

 

I demonstrated ways to integrate the symbols that may be on their piece of paper into their picture- some students loved it and some students traded with their friends who had a blank section. Overall, everyone was happy. 

 

The end result is a ginormous collaborative poster. The students loved coming in this morning and finding where their piece fit in or where their friends' was.

 

Although it took a lot of preparation on my part, I found this exercise an excellent way to see if the students 'got it' and a great example of integrating social justice and community.