South Kent News

A Central Park Learning Center and Center Elementary art teacher provided the Grandville School Board with information on a program meant to cultivate the creativity of children during a recent meeting.

Tara Meeuwsen, a Crayola Creativity Ambassador last year, informed the board that the school had just  celebrated National Creativity week. The Crayola-backed program was held in just under 25,000 schools this year.

“The goal of Creativity Week is just to really get these kids to think about what it means to break the rules and to think outside of the box and to make something different than anybody else,” said Meeuwsen.

Meeuwsen also presented some of the initiatives that were utilized in the classrooms and she brought several students with her to talk about how they felt about creativity and how they used it in some of their recent projects.

In order to connect art and some of the core classes, they brought in their lessons to the art room. Among the art mergers was NASA and space.

One of the projects was an Alien Cheerleader project and another student said that art was an outlet for her to feel better about herself.

Students also made artwork based on the music that they listened to,  along with stories from English class. The district is also having students compete in the Doodle for Google program in the hopes that their high school art clubs expand and grow.