The Great Artdoors: Hello Class!! Say hi to Cooper.

This past summer, the summer of 2011, was my third summer at an 8 week sleep away camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. I had gone on many job interviews before leaving for camp for the summer and had my fingers crossed so hard they were blue in hopes that I would secure an art teaching position before I left. My dream came true!! I was offered the Elementary Art Teaching job for the Peshtigo School District which is about an hour North of Green Bay, WI. Needless to say... I was ecstatic! While working as a camp counselor that summer, I was able to do a lot of traveling around the East Coast with my campers and the idea dawned on me that I should take full advantage of this. I decided to create my own class mascot and use it to help introduce myself to my new students in the fall. Being an avid outdoors man, I have always had a strange obsession with moose, so I found a cool little moose figurine and began carrying him with me everywhere I went, taking photos of him doing various things and posing in front of famous and historic sites in Boston, New York City, and various other places along the way. I named him Cooper the Moose and he soon became a celebrity among the children at camp so I new that my students would also like him. When I returned home from camp and began setting up my classroom, I made a slide show of all the places that Cooper traveled to this past summer. This way, I was introducing myself to the students and they learned about some cool things that I got to do without me saying "I did this, and I went here" because all the focus was on Cooper. The kids loved him and especially like it when I paint different outfits and costumes on him. Here are some photos or my little artsy moose...Cooper