FORT SMITH, Ark. — Most area students are heading back to class on Monday, March 27, after spending last week on spring break.
At one Fort Smith school, some elementary school students got a chance to reflect on an amazing art project they completed right before the break. It’s called black light art.
Kindergarten through 8th graders at First Lutheran School in Fort Smith spent several weeks coming up with each design and how best it would look under a black light.
Fine Arts teacher Kathleen Davis says it was a little bit out of the ordinary.
“I'm always looking for different things for the kids to do, rather than the same old boring projects that you might see. And this just popped up, I'm interested in things that bring out the colors of the world and the excitement. And when I first presented this idea to some of the older kids, they were very excited.”
In fact, Davis says the students really took off with it.
“It's a little hard to get middle schoolers excited about much of anything. But they were really enthusiastic about this. And so I bought him some fluorescent paint, I brought a couple of black lines from home, we started experimenting, and they just kept getting more and more excited. So we started developing projects together.”
Kristen Basham is the Director of the school’s Community Involvement and says it does so much for the students.
“It causes our children to be so well rounded like we're giving them the academics. And we're giving them many opportunities in the community for service. But then we're also just giving them such an appreciation for the arts. we want our children to leave us when they go out into the world well rounded, having an amazing education and all facets of lives.”
Davis says it opens the students’ creative minds.
“It opens up their creativity, which is really, really a God-given talent that all children have all children are creative. And it's so neat to see it brought out in the sea, have them bring it out themselves through what they can create with the materials at hand.”
The art project came down the Friday before spring break. The school’s next big project is a musical coming up later this spring.
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