Teacher Goes Viral After Letting Students Doodle on Dress She Bought for Art Show
Rebecca Bonner is an art teacher in Highland Village, Texas. She works at McAuliffe Elementary School, and has an obvious passion for art.
She’s bold, too. She entrusted the design of one of her dresses to her 580 students ranging in age from 3 to 11 — not something every teacher would do.
Bonner said she got the idea from an art teacher Facebook group, and fell in love with it. The first step was to buy a white dress from Amazon as the perfect canvas for her students’ creativity.
The next step?
“I got fabric markers and sharpies,” she told GMA. “I laid out my dress for two weeks and just let them doodle on it.”
“Being their teacher dressed up in their doodles is always fun.”
Of course, there were some guidelines to ensure that no one student monopolized the dress and that all the doodles passed inspection.
“My kids loved taking part in designing my dress,” she told CNN. “We talked about how we had to be respectful of each other’s artwork and chose images that I would like on my dress. I loved watching my kids design it.”
“This year as the District Art Show approached, I decided I would wear it again. My kids loved that I wore it again. A lot of the new students and my kindergartners want me to make a new one for our end of the year school art show!”
When her daughter took a photo of her mom’s unique dress and tweeted it, it took off, inspiring plenty of other teachers and educators who are now planning on doing something similar.
“I’m not worried about being famous or anything like that but I do think it’s great to promote the arts, because elementary art is not everywhere,” Bonner said.
my mom is the cutest art teacher ever!! She made a dress and had every one of her students draw one thing on the dress for her to wear. This was her at her student’s art show tonight. IM SOBBING pic.twitter.com/6Q7L2mq5jQ
— Charlece Lake (@charlece_lake) March 23, 2019
“I think it’s really important for kids to have that outlet, to have that place to create, and that freedom to create.”
Apparently, one of her mottos is “turn your mess up into a dress up,” and that couldn’t be more literal than the situation she’s created.
“I think she just inspires students to be creative and just make their mistakes into something beautiful,” her daughter, Charlece Lake, said.
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