How does caring feel? What does it look like? Wear your caring feelings on a colorful cummerbund or sash!

• 1.

  Talk about feelings of caring. Who and what do you care for? How do you show your feelings? View Kokoshka's Girl With Doll and Renoir's Woman With Cat or Madame Monet With Her Son. How do these artists show caring in their paintings? Talk about how the colors, expressions, and figures show caring.

• 2.

  Use Crayola® Erasable Colored Pencils to outline a person on paper. What behaviors and attitudes make a person caring? Brainstorm ideas and write words on and around your person. Draw symbols that remind you of the idea of caring, such as hearts, doodles, and sketches of things and people you care about. Choose colors that you think are caring colors.

• 3.

  Plan a design for a cummerbund or sash on paper using ideas from your brainstorm. The colored pencils easily erase if you change your mind! With Crayola Scissors, cut a wide piece of cotton or 50/50 cotton/polyester fabric to fit around your waist.

• 4.

  Cover your art surface with paper. Wear a painting shirt. With Crayola Fabric Markers, create symbols of caring. Draw yourself and others caring for treasured objects, pets, and people. Write words. Fill your cummerbund with the colors of caring! Air-dry the fabric before wearing it.

Standards

• LA: Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.
• LA: Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.
• LA: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
• LA: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade level topics and texts, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly.
• SS: Explore and describe similarities and differences in the ways groups, societies, and cultures address similar human needs and concerns.
• SS: Describe ways in which language, stories, folktales, music, and artistic creations serve as expressions of culture and influence behavior of people living in a particular culture.
• SS: Identify and describe ways family, groups, and community influence the individual's daily life and personal choices.
• VA: Use different media, techniques, and processes to communicate ideas, experiences, and stories.
• VA: Use visual structures of art to communicate ideas.

Adaptations

• Have students organize a "Courage to Care" day at school. Older students can lead younger children in activities for the day, including reading picture books about courage, caring, and compassion. Discussions should follow each read to assist with defining each concept. Students post to a blog after each read about the activity.
• Older students can be encouraged to write an original scene that they can present to classmates or younger students to discuss. Have participants illustrate the scene and write a short explanation of the resolution.