On Wednesday, April 25, over 540 Linwood E. Howe Elementary School students contributed to a “green” art installation that will be hung in the school library.
The art will be a colossal hanging work made up of over 1200 discarded DVD’s and CD’s strung together. Each student drew on a disk with a permanent marker transforming it from trash to treasure. Student’s signed their work with their name and a personal green pledge.
This project was created thanks to the collaborative effort of the Linwood E. Howe Green Team, Art Outreach, Green 5 (which promotes green sustainability in the district and is being piloted at Linwood E. Howe), and the teaching staff at at the school.
Angela Dyborn, a parent and active member of Art Outreach suggested this project after seeing a similar installation at the Children’s Museum of Phoenix, AZ while vacationing with her family.
“It was a marriage of thoughts,” Dyborn said. “We like big projects because we do a class gift to the school every year so we’re always looking for big scale projects and the strings of DVD’s is a big scale project. And at my work I was cleaning out and there were stacks and stacks of DVD’s and CD’s that were now obsolete for our purposes.”
The volume of the final project drives home the significance of recycling with fun and imagination.
“It sparks ideas!” Dyborn added.
Councilmember Meghan Sahli-Wells participated as a parent and member of the Green Team, sharing in the opportunity to contribute to this meaningful and fun project.
When it comes to educating the green message Councilmember Sahli-Wells said, “It’s got to be accessible and fun. Something people really believe in. It can’t be like homework.”