To Paint, or Not to Paint?

     Well, we did it.  We moved.  We left our beloved students and school to  move to Terre Hill, Pennsylvania, where Jeff is the director of music and art at Shalom Mennonite School.  I, Deana, am homeschooling our children for at least the next year to recover some long-overdue one-on-one time with them. 

     So . . . . welcome to our, well, mostly Jeff's, new classroom at Shalom.  

     To paint, or not to paint?  That is the question.  For Jeff,  the answer was not to paint.  The answer was to buy about five of those big bulletin paper rolls and to stick them all over the walls like wall paper.  This is not difficult to do if you have a wife who is willing to take rolls of masking tape, make them into those little sticky loop things, and stick them all over the wall for three days straight while you cut out sea creatures from posters and stick them on top of the wall paper stuff.  

      Then, of course, we had to hang stuff from the ceiling.  This is not too difficult if you have two sons who like to cut fishing line and climb up on ladders.  There is a lot of interesting stuff to observe if you look up in this classroom.

 

 
One of these things is not like the others.  One of these things just doesn't belong.  Can you guess which one is not like the other, before I finish my song?  Yes, boys and girls, the long horn steer does not belong with the other things that are all found in the ocean.    He says he put it up there to see who will notice it first.  It does make one think a little bit.
     Someone asked if he was teaching science or something like that.  "No," he replied.
     "Well, then what do all the sea creatures and ocean stuff have to do with music?" they asked.
     "Nothing," Jeff replied with a smile.  "But the students sure will love coming to music and art class."  But the more we thought about it, it has everything to do with art, beauty, and God's creation. The students will be surrounded by beautiful and interesting things every time they come into the classroom.  And that is exactly the atmosphere we want to provide for the art and music students.