Lower School Art
When constructing art projects for her Lower School students, Jan Wiesner tries to incorporate elements from science, spirituality and language arts.
“I particularly like to pull ideas from non-Western art since many of those art objects are not just decorative. They have a function,” says Mrs. Wiesner.
“Take the Tibetan monks, for example.” In one of their few acts of non-private prayer, the monks create flags and assign a specific prayer to that flag. When the wind blows as the flag hangs outside the door, the prayer is carried all over the world.
In a similar fashion, Mrs. Wiesner had her second grade students build three-dimensional hearts out of clay and assign an individual prayer to each heart.
“The most popular prayer this winter was for peace… an end to war,” says Mrs. Wiesner.
For each year that the child is on earth, a clay pebble is encased inside the heart. As the fired and glazed heart is shaken, the sound beat carries the child’s prayer across the world.
