Look what they left behind!

I started a tradition with our 6th graders a while back that we call a "Legacy Project." This year, after a request from our awesome phy.ed. teacher, the sixth graders worked on creating a mural in our gym that showed the five components of physical fitness: flexibility, muscular endurance, muscular strength, cardiovascular endurance and body composition. We also added "sportsmanship" because we felt it was an important element of physical education.

The process of painting in the gym

The Process:

Each table formed a "team" and worked together to define their term, brainstorm a list of possible activities to show the term and used a template to plan out the body shapes. 

Then, we projected their drawings onto the gym walls and traced them with pencil. Using the leftover wall paint colors from when our school was renovated, we filled in each figure with solid colors.

The Product:

When it was all finished, we photographed the final figures and put them in the WordFoto app so others could easily see what each figure represented.

The Legacy Project is something that our 6th graders really seem to enjoy. And when we talk about the process afterwards, I'm always surprised by the conversations. I asked the kids how they felt about working on something for about a month, but not having anything to "take home and hang on the fridge." They were so cool about it - they said they may not have anything to take home, but their art will be in our school for years and hundreds of kids will see it! There's a LOT of planning and prep work to make a process like this go smoothly, but that kind of reaction is why I'll continue this tradition!

~Amy