Art, Math, and Collaboration

A collage showing Erwin High School students helping West Buncombe Elementary School students with their coloring books.

By Tim Reaves
BCS Communications Department

This week, a wonderfully collaborative project brought high school and elementary school students together and showed how fun math can be!

Pre-calculus students at Clyde A. Erwin High School had been using equations, transformations, and domain restrictions to create pictures out of graphs. Their teachers, Ms. Shannon Phelps and Mr. Jeffrey Crayton, wanted to turn the graphs into some kind of lasting project. Phelps, whose own children went to West Buncombe Elementary, decided on a coloring book, and the high schoolers got to work.

“Having an end goal of an actual product for children to color helped spur their creativity and made them more excited about the project,” Phelps said. “They worked for weeks perfecting their images. Some of our students' graphs used over 300 equations!”

On Wednesday, they walked across the street to the elementary school to visit Ms. Brittany Hensley’s and Ms. Kelia Banks’ second-grade classes. The Pre-calculus students explained to second-graders how they made the coloring books, then passed them out and spent time coloring and chatting with younger students.

“The short field trip turned out to be so much better than any of us expected,” Phelps said. “The elementary students were very interested in learning how our students used math equations to make some of their favorite characters and logos (Tweety Bird, Toad, Gatorade, etc.). And some of the high school students said that was the first time they had colored in years. All of them had wonderful conversations. As a matter of fact, my students have asked when we can go back and visit with them.”

DISTRICT

Elementary

Intermediate

Middle

High

Other

Buncombe County Schools