Once Upon A Time.....

Once upon a time I was an elementary school teacher (actually last year at this time) and these are some of the images I created in chalk. Ninety percent of what I do is oil paint, but when I taught I worked in chalk ---- not pastel, just blackboard chalk. After I told the children their morning lesson story, I would do the image that they would then put into their morning lesson books. You do the math: 175 days of school times 8 years -- a lot of stories and drawings. I told a story a day for all eight years beginning in first grade with Grimm's fairy tales and ending in eighth grade with stories of the Dust Bowl and Physics. We did everything from history, geography (maps of the entire world), math, chemistry, earth science, the inventions of the nineteenth century. The first picture was done in a 3rd-4th grade class (I was a sub. last year) -- one of those Norse myths as one of the heroes is sent off in his Viking ship to burn at sea. The giraffe and the alligator were done in the animal block and finally, my claim to fame --- the Waldorf Curriculum poster. This was done in colored pencil before I actually started teaching in 1995 and lithographed, about 1500 copies. The poster is still sold and hangs in numerous Waldorf school all over the United States. Many of my former parents purchased them for their home and the kids followed them as we went along through the years. My former class will be graduating high school in June this year. I've moved on to oil and watercolor. All those chalk drawings and I only brought my camera about a half dozen times -- the rest were erased. Oh, well, I had the fun of doing them.