Alphabet Art

James calls me an alphabet geek.  It’s true.  I collect alphabet books and alphabet art.  I alphabetize things when I can’t sleep at night–the fifty states, the countries in Africa, my cousins, the people I work with.  Ever since I was kid, I look around for letters from A-Z while I wait in line, or in a doctor’s office, or when I am bored in meetings.  I even wrote an alphabet comic book once.  So I guess it’s not too surprising that I came up with “alphabet art.”

Alphabet Art was born out of desperation.  I taught fifteen years before I stepped into an elementary classroom.  I had tough gang kids in my classroom, teen moms, crazy middle school kids with raging hormones.  Before that, I waitressed at a biker bar with a fair trade of cocaine flying out the backdoor, but not even that prepared me for kindergarten.  First off, the average five year old speaks gibberish.  If I ask, “What’s your name? ”  They just stare at me.  They pee on their chairs, because they forget to ask to go the bathroom.  They eat stuff like paper and glue.  And every year, someone says, “Is paint water poisonous?”  Always after someone has taken a sip.

I was provided a kindergarten curriculum that has fun lessons like–paint thick and thin stripes–draw a house with shapes, make rough and smooth lines.  I don’t know who wrote these lessons, but clearly, they have no idea what the hell they are talking about.  I tried to follow the book and some of the lessons worked, but more times than not, the kindergartens transformed into pterodactyls.  One time we went outside to gather leaves for leaf rubbings.  I did not give clear instructions, which would have been “stay in a single file line, follow me, don’t talk, don’t hit each other, only breathe enough to stay alive.”  Instead they raced outside, screaming at the top of their lungs, and proceeded to roll around in the leaves like puppies.  I rounded them up, gave each of them a leaf and made it back to the classroom with the whole class. Half of the monsters had lost their leaves on the way back.  I said, “Where’s your leaf?”  Shrugged shoulders and “it flew away,” where some of the answers.  Everyday after the kindergarten left, I’d stack tiny chairs, and sweep up paper, and wipe down sticky tables.  Somedays, I nearly wept in frustration.  After a couple of years of this, I decided I needed a better system and Alphabet Art was born.

Each week, I base my lesson on a letter of the alphabet, an animal starting with that letter, and an art concept.  The first year, I spent a lot of time researching art concepts that would work–b–beading, c–crayons, clay, d–drawing, e–earth art.  Some of the letters leant themselves to a concept more than others.  Sometimes the art is more about the animal associated with the letter.  For “A” the animal is an alligator, so I teach the kids to watercolor because alligators live in water.  They paint alligators.  Most of the letters have a story to go with the concept.  Most of the stories, I’ve made up on the fly.  V for vampire bat is my favorite story.  It’s about a vampire bat from Venezuela who is a vegetarian who only eats violet vegetables.  He decides to move to Vermont to join a vegetarian village, but he doesn’t have enough vitamins to fly, so he decides to walk.  He hitches a ride on top of. a VW van, but gets blown off.  Don’t worry, no one dies in the story.  Sometimes there are adults in my room when I tell these stories.  They either laugh or give me that look that screams, “Oh my god, this woman is crazy.”

Alphabet art has evolved over the years.  When I first started, my ideas got more and more elaborate with each letter.  Take H for example, I couldn’t think of anything “h” related for an art concept.  The animal is a horse.  I came across an article about horses in art history.  Kindergarteners don’t even really know what history is, but I take a stab at teaching them about art history around horses.  Horses were painted in caves thousands of years ago; the Greeks painted horses on their pottery; in modern times artists paint, draw and sculpt horses.  I set up three stations–I have a “cave” where kids add to a horse painted on the wall.  We make horses with red clay.  And I have a drawing, coloring station related to horses.  I cycle the kids through the stations in thirty minutes and wrangle two or three people to make it all work.  The letter “I” has a “build an inchworm” station.  I hot glue pom pom’s together as fast as I can, burning myself 40,000 times and holding in the “f” bomb.  The letter Q involves so much prep that I started questioning the whole concept of alphabet art and I realized that it didn’t have to be so hard and I simplified my ideas.  I still need volunteers on a few of the letters, but everything runs pretty smoothly.  I have a tub, and I just get the materials out each week and I’m ready to roll.

I like to think of alphabet art is an introduction to all the things kids will get to do in art in all the years to come.  I think the kids like it.  Sometimes the first graders ask to do alphabet art again.  And when I’m glazing the cats after “c”, or snakes after “s,”  kids always look over the cats and snakes knowingly and tell me that they still have their cats and snakes.  All the kids remember doing Earth art and want to know when they get to do that again.  And I couldn’t  get through Q, without the fifth graders helping me cut quilt squares.  The best thing about Alphabet art though is that I don’t feel like the kindergarteners are trying to kill me anymore. Now they wait until first grade.  I’m working on a survival strategy for them too.  First grade art is supposed to be all about self discovery in art.  I’m thinking about inventing “Monster Art” for them.  They could draw monsters.  It would be like self-portraits.  Who knows?  I might be on to something.