As lower school art teachers at The Willows, Kristy Acero & Christian Isbell are no strangers to big ideas. It’s common for them to incorporate curricular lessons into ideas for thoughtful and detailed student art projects, transforming them into artistic prompts for a wide variety of classes. With these prompts. students often explore visual meaning through their own individual perspectives. However, more recently, Kristy & Christian shared an idea to celebrate Lunar New Year, not as individuals, but as a collective Willows community.
With it being the Year of the Dragon, Acero & Isbell lead DK-4th grade in a large-scale, collaborative project, with each grade creating a portion of a 3-D realistic dragon. Spanning close to 50 feet in length, the dragon is a definitive example of a team effort, with each grade contributing to the larger goal. Currently displayed in the Building 1 hallway, the dragon serves as a reminder of the collective strength of our community, and how the sky's the limit when we work together. Learn more about the creative process and construction of the dragon in the video below!