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I use an activity called, "I Want My Dada."

Dadaism was popular from 1916 to about 1920, mainly in Germany, France and New York City. This art/music/literature movement promoted creativity, free thinking and abolition of cultural norms. One of its tenets was using found objects to create art.

I use Dadaism in my classroom to expand creative fluency. I found this necessary during a solar system unit when, after asking children to draw a picture of the sun that represented their personality, over half of the class drew a yellow circle with a happy face and sunglasses on it. Not original!

For I Want My Dada, I give the students a prompt and they use words and letters from the News-Journal along with other objects, textures and symbols to create Dadaist "artistic poetry."

For example, I gave them the prompt, "It is important to lick the bowl." They cut out words and letters from the newspaper using free association with the prompt. One child cut out different sizes and colors of letters and words to spell, "Bowl me over...300" and glued them onto construction paper in an interesting fashion. He added a plastic spoon from his snack. He made the paper into a bowling ball shape and coated the edges with brown marker to represent chocolate cake batter. Very creative!

These activities are works in progress - free flowing.

Dadaism relates to the Sunshine State Standards for gifted education in that it promotes creativity, vocabulary development, understanding word meanings and idiomatic language, and helps children finds relationships between words and objects that previously weren´t readily apparent. It also allows the children to understand that there is more to life than just writing to a prompt.

After the initial activity, I have kept a Dada center in the room (filled with various paper, small objects, newspapers, magazines, etc.) for enrichment (students can work on their creations when assigned work is complete and they have extra time).

Monica Sherwin
4th Grade Gifted
Tomoka Elementary

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