"I think it looks amazing," said Caroline A. Judge, a fifth grader from South Hadley

 

Caroline is my niece.

Mural painting eases boredom
Thursday, June 25, 2009
By DIANE LEDERMAN

HADLEY - Art teacher Carol E. Pineo said that Hadley School Superintendent Nicholas D. Young came back from a national conference earlier this school year and one of the complaints voiced was that schools were too boring.

"Let's make the schools less boring," the elementary school art teacher thought. And her way to do so was to paint a mural or several.

She started back in October outside of the library with a group of sixth grade students who would paint when they could after school. That one featured a lot of books and was inspired by a poem written by a 7-year-old.

"The librarian put up a display of books to support the mural," Pineo said.

When they finished that mural, she wanted to attack what she had called "30 feet of boring" near the library but her student painters instead wanted to dress up the younger students wing.

And so they turned to that - first painting a castle around a set of doors leading into the wing and then most recently her band of eager painters began an adjacent mural featuring all kinds of characters from books, games and cartoons perched on and organized around the Candy Land game. There's Dumbo aloft, the Three Little Pigs, Thing One and Thing Two from Dr. Seuss among the dozens and dozens of characters.

Ideas of what to include came from students and teachers and the painters cut and pasted and assembled what Pineo called a cartoon that was then copied onto a piece of acetate and that was projected on the wall so the painters could trace the design before painting.

"The fun part was how do you take all these disparate stories and blend them all together," she said.

"I think it looks amazing," said Caroline A. Judge, a fifth grader from South Hadley. Pineo said those working on this mural are fifth graders because the sixth graders were busy with other things. Judge painted a lot of the Candy Land board. "It was one of my favorite board games," the 10-year-old said. "I love painting." And she said "our names are going to be up forever."

"We put a lot of work into it," said Emily E. Young, 10, who also loves art. She painted a lot of the bricks on a wall framing the mural. "Some of it's hard, some of it is somewhat simple." She gets great joy "seeing the little kids, seeing them come and smile."

"I really love art. I really like it," said Aubrey M. Denson-Harrison, of Northampton. "It makes me feel proud." And the 11-year-old said "I'm learning how do a lot of detail."

Pineo said the students were right to paint for the littlest students. She said often the little ones come over from the after school program to watch the older students paint. Two who have been particularly interested are six-year-old twins Zoey L. Lapis and Avery R. Lapis. "There are a lot of different colors," Zoey said.

And her sister calls it "Princessland." When they move down the hall to their classroom, she said, "we think we're going into a castle."