Skagway students of all ages took scraps from around town and repurposed them into eye-catching art for the school fashion show. KHNS reporter Melinda Munson was at the catwalk and has this story.
Skagway School premiered its first wearable art show on April 3. It was a fashion event that combined STEM skills, recycling and art. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math.
Fifth grader Hudson Guilliams helped emcee the event. Here, he’s introducing fifth grader Rose Purdue. She created a rainbow fairy piece with wings built from paper paint chips.
Guilliams: “Let’s welcome this colorful art piece to the runway!”
(clapping and cheering)
Fourth grade teacher, Danielle McManus, says the idea for the show came from this year’s First Lego League’s theme – masterpiece.
First Lego League is an engineering and design unit that is taught in fourth and fifth grades. Along with designing costumes for the show, the two grades built Lego performance stages with lights and sound. They also had to design the actual stage and decide which music to use.
Stage manager Andrew Nadon helped with the music and science consultant Reuben Cash manned the lights. Cash also created the projections, which danced across the stage throughout the production.
The costumes ranged from a bubble bath complete with a tub to an ensemble of rock, paper, scissors. Art teacher Valerie Larsen helped the younger grades assemble pieces for The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Some middle and high schoolers participated, outfitting the younger students. Lila Larson styled her little sister, Elliott, as Mushroom Princess.
Fifth grade teacher Mary Thole sought expert help from out of state. After multiple long-distance consults, she flew her mother-in-law up from Minnesota, to help sew the costumes.
It was important to the kids that the costumes be made from material already on hand. Most of the costume pieces were scrounged from the school property or borrowed from the community. McManus, the fourth grade teacher, says there were two new purchases.
“The only thing that we bought was gold spray paint, two cans of gold spray paint,” she said.
Fourth grader Vinya Matsov was the scissors in rock, paper, scissors. He got his red tee-shirt from the school attic, borrowed pool noodles to make his scissor handles and wrapped his legs in unused silver insulation. He realized that comfort sometimes has to be sacrificed for fashion.
“Well, I couldn’t bend my legs, which was a problem” Matsov said. “And when I took it off, I felt like bending my legs is the best thing in the world. But if you could see I was stumbling down the steps a bit there because I couldn’t bend my legs.”
McManus says throughout the process, students learned how to tackle technical challenges. She says even she was taken aback by the success of the production.
” …the fact that it just kind of blew everybody’s expectations out of the water was probably the most surprising part and just how much fun everybody had,” she said.
