Art: “I'm a Roly Poly Artist and I'm happy to create."

Our 2 year old Roly Polies have been exploring what it means to be an artist. Out with the crayons and in with Queen’s very own Run DMC. They began their unit throwing it down, “muggin”, and scratching to Run DMC’s “Wake Up”! They learned the first few lines of the song, which encourage us to wake up and be better people, to ourselves and to each other like Vvgotsky explains: “hence, we may say that we become ourselves through others and that this rule applies not only to the personality as a whole, but also to the history of every individual function.”

By utilizing art and the culture of the city in which they live to scaffold their social/emotional, cognitive, physical, and language development they hope to instill in each Roly Poly a sense of confidence, empathy, camaraderie, and the importance of being a good person. They have also been discussing the importance of the word RESPECT. Many Ropos have begun to utilize the word in their every day language when interacting with friends on the playground. Our RoPos have truly taken to the role of young rap artists, each Roly Poly has come up with his and her own MC/DJ pseudonym and they are SO proud and excited! They went around the Circle asking each RoPo to make up a name that fits their idea of who they are and boy did they have us laughing! They”ve got MC Machine, Lightzout, Flowers, Flip, Olympia, Moo-Moo, McMuffin, Dinosaur, etc.

They took it even further by writing our own raps! They have begun rapping them on stage in front of a very respectful audience of RoPo friends building up our confidence, memory, language development and a different modes of expression. These Roly Pollies are incredibly talented artists, and they know it!