Greenwood Middle School student Keagan Murray, right, hands his brother Jackson Taylor, left, a dimensional doll he made based on his brother’s monster design at Westwood on Wednesday. Students from both Westwood and GMS worked together on a project that transformed kinder’s drawings into dimensional dolls.
Noah Crenshaw | Daily Journal
In a classroom at Westwood Elementary School Wednesday, kindergartners’ drawings of monsters were brought to life.
For the last few weeks, students in Maureen Hoffman-Wehmeier’s eighth-grade Family and Consumer Sciences class at Greenwood Middle School have been working on sewing “monster dolls.” The dolls were based on designs created by students in Lauren Eurglunes’ kindergarten class.
On Wednesday, the eighth graders traveled to Westwood to deliver the dolls to their kindergarten artists and chat with them about their monsters.
The idea for the monster doll project came from Hoffman-Wehmeier. Several months ago, she heard about another school in Indiana where art students had made monster dolls for kindergarten students. She asked the art teacher from that school about the details of the project and posted photos and details on Facebook.
That’s where Eurglunes got involved. She liked the post and the Hoffman-Wehmeier asked if she wanted to do the project.
“I was like, ‘Of course, we will do this,’” Eurglunes said. “I was excited to share this with my kinders. It’s only my second year teaching, so any opportunity to make their learning experience great works for me.”
Hoffman-Wehmeier then asked the principal of Westwood about it, and he was all for the partnership. With permission, Eurglunes reached out to the families of her students to see if they would be willing to donate to the project to make it happen.
“They were more than willing to jump on board and see their child’s creations come to life,” she said.
From there, Eurglunes’ students worked on creating their monsters. They were able to design them however they wanted, and she gave them some examples to start off with, she said.
“I gave a couple of examples of different monsters that they could draw, and then they let their creativity go from there to draw their own monster,” Eurglunes said.
The drawings were then sent to Hoffman-Wehmeier’s class. Hoffman-Wehmeier’s eighth-graders spent three weeks working on making the monsters a reality by sewing dolls.
While another teacher helped with enlarging the patterns, the eighth-graders did all of the sewing themselves.
“My students stitched by hand or used machines,” Hoffman-Wehmeier said. “They were able to add some touches, some embellishments like eyes that move or glitter or movable body parts.”
For the sewing unit, students usually make pillows. Students still had the option to make pillows, but many chose to make a monster doll — and some were able to do both, she said.
“My students have been so excited to create for kindergarteners, to just come back and sort of relive those times when they were little and be able to give back,” Hoffman-Wehmeier said.
During this process, Hoffman-Wehmeier’s students became interested in learning more about the kindergartner’s monsters. So Eurglunes decided to have them create stories about their monsters to share with the eighth-graders Tuesday.
“I let them have free rein on writing a story about their monster, like naming their monster, what their monster likes to do, what they like to do with their monsters,” Eurglunes said.
The kindergartners couldn’t wait to see their monsters come to life. Up until the moment eighth-graders arrived Wednesday, the kindergarteners had no idea who had been working on making their monster into a doll.
Once they found out who had been making their monster dolls, the students jumped up in excitement Wednesday. Once students started taking the dolls out of the bags, the Eurglunes’ classroom was filled with joy.
One of Hoffman-Wehmeier’s students actually created a doll based on his brother’s drawing. At first, eighth-grader Keagan Murray did not know he would be creating a doll based on drawings from his little brother Jackson Taylor’s class.
“At the beginning, I was going to do a pillow,” Murray said.
However, after he asked Hoffman-Wehmeier about what class she had partnered with, he found out it was his brother’s. Murray told Hoffman-Wehmeier about this, and he asked to be able to make his brother’s monster, he said.
He also had to keep it secret from Jackson, which was challenging at times.
“He kept asking me at home if I chose him and I said, ‘No someone else did it,” Murray said. “I wanted to tell him, but in the end, I knew I needed to show him”
Once Wednesday arrived, Murray told his brother that he had made his drawings into a reality and showed him the monster doll. Taylor immediately ran up to his brother and hugged his legs in joy.
The monster, named Baldy, was gray and black and likes to go to the zoo, Taylor said. He was very happy to receive it and said he was going to keep it forever.
Hoffman-Wehmeier already has plans to do the project again next year and has ideas for expanding it to include all of the kindergarten classes. Eighth graders collaborating with kindergartners is a great way for students to give back to their community and create positive relationships between the grade levels, she said.
“These are positive big kids, and so they can be positive role models,” she said. “Maybe they’ll continue a little friendship.”
Eurglunes is more than happy to do the project again next year, she said.
“It’s nice that the kindergarteners get to collaborate with older students, eighth graders to get this project completed,” she said. “It was really fun to see that.”
