eMpathy Project - Our HeArTs are in it!

 Have you noticed that the new norm for our society is a lack of eMpathy? Well, the Maclay Visuals Art's Teachers decided to try and help this issue in our community. 

The Maclay Visual Arts teachers, Kim Daniel, Cathy Hicks, Kyle Maurey and Kaitlyn Dressel, want to raise awareness of empathy on our campus by using an unspoken and universal language of art. We are all working together to be positive instigators on and off of our Maclay School campus.

We are promoting this project and calling it Maclay eM Projects”  We have expanded from the basic “Maclay eM Bracelets” with the #maclaycares in order to teach empathy within our school. The branding behind this idea was to spell “me” backwards in a very simple transitional reminder of putting others first. It is also a word play on eMpathy (capital M for Marauders.) Each Maclay eM Project will serve as a beautiful and simple reminder that you are loved and that we care.

The eM Projects will be an innovative hand crafted project that unites our school directly with the community. Doing the hard work of trying to change the world in some way that matters is what we try to facilitate here in our field and what seems to matter in general. It’s a different take on what matters in life than what the mainstream of our society serves up.

The big idea is to take the concept of the eM Project is to help mentor our students in the understandings of the 5 pillars of Character Education: Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, and Citizenship. With this art lesson, we want our students to create and give these Maclay eM Bracelets / Projects to others as a reminder of how they can help others feel through being cared for by a random act of kindness.  Being models for understanding what we do and what its value is; why we make things, why it matters, how it fits into the scheme of living a good life, and how the individual effort relates to society as a whole.

This year we grew with our idea. We started creating heart ornaments. See below for our examples.

 To learn more about how we got started see the links below:

https://2soulsisters.blogspot.com/2018/04/maclay-schools-faculty-excellence-grant.html

 https://2soulsisters.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-maclay-visual-arts-teachers-kim.html

https://2soulsisters.blogspot.com/2017/11/embedding-empathy-maclay-students.html

 We left these for our Board of Trustees. They were a huge hit!

 Our students made one to take home and one to give to someone else. The eM charms are expensive, so the one you give away has that on it and the one you keep has eM written on the back in #2 pencil. When fired at 06 / 04 the lead turns read. (fun fact)

 Used slab roller and cookie cutters to create the heart ornaments.

 We stacked the green ware and bisque ware as we waited to fire and glaze.

Once glazed then we put back in kiln and got ready for the next step of beading and wiring for giving.
Don't know why I chose this song....I just like it...enjoy