Your students make amazing pieces of art.
The artwork is displayed beautifully all winter.
Portfolios are assembled, assessments are finished.
Now, the artwork can finally be sent home….and in the process it gets destroyed!
You get angry emails from parents stating that their kids’ beautiful art work was ruined on the bus.
As an art teacher, you know there are so many barriers to getting the artwork home safely: small lockers, stuffed backpacks, wet mittens, bad weather, the list goes on. It can be difficult to come up with practical solutions, but today we have some for you!
Here are 7 safer ways you might consider sending artwork home!
1. Roll up the artwork and have students put a rubber band or a cardboard mailing tube around it. While this is expensive, it’s pretty foolproof.
2. Have the grocery store donate brown paper bags. Have students decorate them, put artwork inside and hand carry them out of the art room.
3. Assemble portfolios with thick, large paper. Staple them shut and have students hand carry them out.
4. Send home artwork on the night of a band concert or parent teacher conferences when most parents will already be at school. This method works especially well for clay pieces.
5. Let parents know when you’re going to send work home using a letter or email. Alerting parents ahead of time may give them the option to pick their children up that day, or meet them at the door to make sure the artwork safely makes it into the car.
6. Have students carry artwork out in simple plastic recycled grocery bags. The hope with this method is that they won’t shove it in a backpack.
7. Try sending home one piece at a time, so the entire collection doesn’t get blown into the street or thrown in the garbage.
We can help this process along in so many ways, but in the end, it’s about personal responsibility. Be sure to tell your students the care of their artwork is up to them. This is a good life lesson for students of any age, and one they won’t forget.
How do you safely send home student artwork?
Any tricks to share?
Magazine articles and podcasts are opinions of professional education contributors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Art of Education University (AOEU) or its academic offerings. Contributors use terms in the way they are most often talked about in the scope of their educational experiences.
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