An imaginary pet that began as a first grader’s drawing ended up as something much more tangible – a hand-sewn stuffed animal, complete with its own personalized story.
The project brought together first graders at Tryon Elementary School and seventh graders at Polk County Middle School for a collaboration involving art, sewing, computer science and reading.
It began with Tryon first graders drawing imaginary pets and answering questions about their creations and their own interests. Those drawings then traveled to Charlotte Grabman’s seventh-grade Family and Consumer Sciences classes at Polk Middle.
Each seventh grader was matched with one or more drawings and used sewing skills learned in class to recreate the first grader’s pet as a stuffed animal.
Meanwhile, students in Jon Greene’s computer science classes added another piece to the project.
They learned to use artificial intelligence tools to help create an individualized story for each first grader at the student’s reading level. Each story incorporated the child’s name and the name of the imaginary pet.
On Oct. 30, the project came together when the seventh graders traveled to Tryon Elementary to meet their first-grade buddies.
The middle school students helped their buddies read their personalized stories, then presented them with the stuffed animals they had created from the original drawings.
The project required close collaboration between teachers at both schools. Tryon first-grade teachers Connie Edwards, Shea White and Wendi Owens worked with Grabman and Greene at Polk Middle to coordinate the experience.
For the seventh graders, the project put classroom skills to work for a real audience. For the first graders, an idea they first put on paper returned to them as both a story and a handmade keepsake.
