watts up

Naomi and I went on a field trip today to the Watts Towers. It was just the two of us. We went under the auspices of planning a field trip, but I just really wanted to go myself. We ARE going to do a field trip here, and it is going to be rad. I'm going to get my kids all psyched up about different artists in our Imagination unit, and she will get her kids all jazzed about meeting brown, inner-city kids, and then we will SURPRISINGLY be at the Watts Towers on the same day (what a coincidence!) and our pen-pals will get to meet each other.

That's right, our students have been writing letters to each other for the past three months. It's really cute. Her school is all biz-related money money money, super privileged kids, the kind who go to a different country every single winter and summer vacation, and my class learned about Hannukah for the first time this year. One of my writing centers is Write To Your Pen-Pal, and about every two weeks or so Naomi and I trade letters. She came and visited my class to teach them about Costa Rica (she had been), and I came to her class to say hi and talk about the pen-pal project.

So Watts Towers is the perfect place to meet, why not. I was pretty blown away by the sculptures there. We are going to give our own tours, then do a mixer, then have our students work together in groups using toothpicks and clay and beads and shit like that to make their own little Watts Towers.