Observation: Roxie Munro Inside/Outside Project, Roller Coasters, and Picture Day

When I got to the school today, something seemed a little different. Some of the students were all dressed up while others were in what seemed to be regular clothes. As I turned the corner, it hit me. Lines of sharply dressed students, a table with mirrors and brushes, and stations set up with the large dome lights were in the cafeteria. It was Picture Day.

Picture day and I had a strained relationship while I was in school. While I always liked getting my picture taken, I was an awkward kid with frizzy, shoulder length hair, glasses that didn't quite fit right, an overly pale complexion, yellow, crowded teeth, and horrible acne. As I got older they got progressively worse until I was in eighth grade. By that point I had gotten contacts and had started to grow out my now less frizzy hair and learned to pluck my naturally bushy brows. In high school, my pictures weren't terrible, but my face was always broken out around that time in a strange form of acne that I got during marching band season.

My most memorable Picture Day was in 6th grade. My acne was particularly bad that day and my mother tried to help me cover it with a powder foundation that wasn't quite my shade. I was dressed up, hair brushed as best as I could, and make up was on. I felt a bit better about myself, until I got to school and looked in the mirror and saw that my face was peeling and flakes of skin were coming off. I was mortified! The foundation made everything worse. Pictures were terrible that year and I don't even think I let my parents buy them that year because even with the touch-ups, they were quite tragic.

I hoped that none of the kids at this school would have the same Picture Day experiences that I had while in school as I made my way to the art room.

The project that the students started today was a project based on their visiting author, Roxie Munro's Inside/Outside illustration books. In her books, Munro creates detailed illustrations of both the inside and the outside of things, places, and animals. The students were shown the book Hatched by their main teacher. Hatched is about the insides and outsides of various animal eggs.

In class, the art teacher showed the students the book on dinosaurs and the one on libraries on the ELMO projector so that way they would have more examples to work from. She also emphasized using detail lots of details to the students.

The actual project for the students was to create a black and white flip book with the inside and outside of their dream school. It has to be a black and white line drawing because the students only had two days for this project.

With that they set to work.

Some of the students knew exactly what they wanted to do and set off making their bungee-jumping and roller coaster filled schools. Some of the dream schools looked normal on the outside but were every kid's dream on the inside. Others were supposedly invisible, and one boy took inspiration from the movie Sky High and made a school floating in the clouds with flying buses. Other popular themes were sports academies and video games.

However, some students were stumped and didn't quite know what to do for their dream school. They eventually worked it out though.