In our quest to improve our campus with beautiful art and pops of color, Kindergarten teacher Jordan Palmer came up with the idea of creating a huge "Lely Leads" mural and fill it with the hand prints of all of the Lely Elementary students. This was a big, big project that took up an entire wall of the Kindergarten building. The process took a couple of months. We enlisted the help of local artist Matthew Park to help with the mural. Together, Jordan and Matt measured out the letters on the wall, taped the boundaries for the letters, and used a paint sprayer to fill in the enormous letters. From start to finish, painting the letters on the wall took a good three to four hours.
After the letters were painted, the wall looked fresh and neat. This would be the basis for our next move, getting the kids to put their hand prints on the wall. We had several colors to choose from. Each kiddo gloved up, had their gloved hand painted, and high-fived the wall.
After getting all of the kids' hand prints on the wall, we sealed the wall with polyurethane. This wall is a colorful, beautiful mural that every kids had a "hand" in creating. On a daily basis, kids walk by the mural and look for their hand print.
It is important that kids see themselves in their school and that they have stake in their physical environment. We try to get kids involved as much as possible in beautifying campus. They have many ideas and they have the initiative to make those ideas a reality. Now that this area of our school is looking good, we move on to the next area that we want to tackle. So far we have been able to add so many beautiful areas to our school, but we have a large campus, and there is much more to do. With all of the great ideas and efforts of our staff and students, we know in a few years, out entire campus will look amazing!
