Student art brightens up Decas Elementary

Jun 2, 2019

Students at Decas Elementary were seeing double on Thursday as the walls of the school were decorated with self-portraits of every single student — nearly 600 of them.

Kindergartners worked in crayon, first graders in colored pencil, and second graders in oil pastel. All the students cut out their self-portraits and glued them to backgrounds painted with tempera paints, which gave the art a 3-D look.

In addition to the self-portraits, 300 other pieces of art adorned the walls. In the cafeteria, there were plenty of artistic activities for kids to take part in, like book-mark making, face painting, geometric pieces of metallic paper to make collages with.

“They’re brave,” art teacher Tom Tricker said of his students. “They love art.”

He explained that he gave students a template to make sure all the self-portraits were approximately the same size — initially some were tiny while others were huge — and had the students work on the portraits over several weeks. Every student has art class once a week, when Tricker visits their classroom with his cart full of supplies.

The students were certainly proud of their work, as the line to get in to the art show stretched across the building ahead of the opening time, when kids rushed in to point out their work to their parents.