The artists, who have been trained to incorporate academics into the arts, are in the schools through the Fulton County Arts Council's Model Residency Program. Mount Olive Elementary School's 83 third-graders have been working 1 hour and 15 minutes a day for a month with Renee Bowers of the Center for Puppetry Arts on their study of the life cycle of butterflies. They started with building butterfly, hornet, dragonfly and caterpillar puppets. They wrote the script for the play based on their studies that they will perform at 7 p.m. today for their parents and at 9 a.m. Friday for the school. To tie all the lessons together, each class also raised butterflies from cocoons and released the butterflies last week into the school's courtyard.
Bowers incorporates academic lessons into the work students are doing.
They pick up vocabulary words such as metamorphosis, lepidopteran, aposematic coloration, and chrysalis. They learned about the enemies of the caterpillar and mechanisms butterflies use to defend themselves. They are still getting science because that's what it is all about. The program and the lessons taught by the artists at other schools reach students in ways that classroom lectures, books and worksheets may not, school officials say. The lessons will stick with the kids longer because they will remember the experience they had working with Bowers and their puppets, Marsh said.