High School and Eden Hall Teachers Collaborate to Foster Creative Student Connections
Art teachers Katelynn Tronetti and Mary Anne Andreassi recently collaborated in a special way to connect their students as they worked on similar projects.
Mrs. Tronetti’s fifth-grade art students at Eden Hall Upper Elementary School and Mrs. Andreassi’s high school mixed media art students have been working on creative paper-cutting projects. “When Mary Anne and I found out that our students have a connecting piece, we seized the opportunity to connect our students to one another,” said Mrs. Tronetti.
Mrs. Andreassi invited TV production students to interview her students and highlight their art projects. Mrs. Tronetti then played the video for her class so they could gain insight into the older students’ idea generation and artistic process.
Mrs. Andreassi’s mixed media art students started the school year observing works of paper artists, including French/American artist Beatrice Coron. The class discussed how paper artists focus on taking their images and converting them into silhouettes that use positive and negative space. Students practiced using a craft knife to create fine and detailed cuts before converting their ideas into a narrative collar, a story that the students illustrated in their paper cutting.
“Originally, I wanted to explore the concept of making a wearable piece and the concept of a collar worked well for this idea,” said Mrs. Andreassi. Students spent three weeks working on their designs, and when completed, the class engaged in a group discussion about the process and looked at each other’s work.
Senior Lilly Sauer described the project as “a journey, an ongoing process that included lots of drafting and revising.” Her project was titled Changes and followed the metamorphosis of a butterfly. Students shared their project inspirations, which included psychology class, piano playing, a love of nature and a television show.
Senior Evan Osterwise from Aaron Koehler’s TV Production class recorded and edited a video of senior Kiera Moskala interviewing Mrs. Andreassi’s art students who talked about their projects and explained their creative process for the younger students.
Sophomore Madison Began said she thought it was important for younger art students to think of the project as a “way to think of something new as art and have different ideas of what art could be.”
Four high school student projects are part of a display in the high school.
Two fifth-grade students work on cutting paper
Meanwhile, in 5th grade, Mrs. Tronetti’s students were exploring paper cutting as it relates to the Eden Hall building theme this year, “Lights, Camera, Action,” inspired by the book Lotte's Magical Paper Puppets, which uses paper cutting for its illustrations. Mrs. Tronetti worked with Eden Hall Librarian Beth Shenefiel to explore connecting the book with the arts to create projects to display in January when author Katherine Carr visits.
Mrs. Tronetti used the book to help her students explore concepts in the fifth-grade art curriculum, including silhouettes and positive and negative space. Her students also learned about Parth Kothekar, a paper-cutting artist, their September artist of the month. Their first project this year was to develop a story and create a silhouette design. They sketched their ideas or used words to establish an idea in their sketchbooks, and then created either two-dimensional or three-dimensional paper cuts. Some students developed their own three-dimensional designs or coordinated their separate designs to be part of a collaborative display with friends.
Before they could start cutting, students were asked to identify the positive space of their designs as well as what color tissue paper would fill the negative space after they finished the cutting. Mrs. Tronetti’s students used scissors, needle tools and X-acto knives after learning how to safely use these tools and why safety protocols were necessary.
Fifth-grade students watched the high school students’ video while in the middle of their project. They also submitted questions to the older students and were able to review their answers.
A common theme from the high school class was that the project requires patience, that it was hard to come up with an idea, and difficult to make such precise cuts. The younger students appreciated hearing that the older students had the same struggles they experienced.
Project themes in fifth grade included family pets, nature, dancing, gymnastics and dinosaurs. Students used a needle tool to allow light to come through and highlight a different aspect of their designs, such as through music notes to represent the music to which a ballerina was dancing.
“My goal is that these projects will be on display for the art show with a light source to emphasize and illuminate those negative spaces to bring the designs to life with a similar effect achieved in Lotte's Magical Paper Puppets,” said Mrs. Tronetti.
Mrs. Tronetti noted that, because of their varying schedules, it is not often possible to connect students in elementary school with students in high school, but said it is important to connect young minds with older art students and artists to grasp the significance of a subject matter while showing the progression of skills that develop once they leave the elementary level.
“This was significant for my students to see older students show vulnerability behind such intricate designs, and I think it encouraged some of them to persevere when they were having their own difficulties,” said Mrs. Tronetti. “It will be a project that they will remember for years to come because of that additional high school connection.”
Four fifth-grade students' completed projects