Button Project Update: November 2003

I am continually amazed at the sustaining power of this work. Here is an e-mail that I received this week (11/3/03):

"hi, i am an assistant at a nursery school in tenafly nj. i took a class last year called mastering the great masters, and you were one of them. i just introduced my class to michelangelo. we drew up under tables and made sculptures, since that was the word they seemed to remember. i loved the work you did with buttons and felt the children would too. any suggestions for three to four year olds. i loved the 9/11 memorial but can't find a way to introduce it to such young children. i would love to introduce your work and you to the kids. i'd appreciate any help.

thanks, marlene"

I responded to Marlene with a note that is excerpted here:

"Thanks so much for the note and for visiting my web site. I am flattered and honored to be part of your project with your students.

My suggestion with the kids is to have a bucket of buttons out for them to touch, to count and to explore. They might want to line them up and count them, they might want to try to stack them up, they might want to lay them out on patterns, and to organize them by color or some other way.

After they have played and explored with the buttons for awhile, have a discussion about how the buttons are similar, and how they are different. Explore all the ways that they are the same and different at the same time. Talk also about how buttons are used in our lives. What do we use them for? (Closure of an opening, bringing two things together, etc).

Then you can talk about how buttons might be used to represent people (I know metaphor is a big concept!). This is what I did. I used the simple object of a button to represent each life that was lost on 9/11."

Thank you all, once again for your support of this art project. This encouragement sustains my energy to find a permanent home for this work.

Sarah D. Haskell