Fifth grade student Angus Booker shows off his portrait of the late author Beverly Cleary, part of a school display for Women's History Month. Angus chose Cleary because he grew up reading her books and was inspired to write his own stories.
Third grade student Malachi Harrison stands under his art display of Claudia Gordon, who was the first deaf Black female lawyer in the United States.
Betty White was a veteran of the armed forces. Ruby Bridges was the subject of a Normal Rockwell painting. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles is 4-foot, 8-inches tall. Libby Riddles was the first woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
These are just some of the facts learned by Evergreen Elementary students during a March art project for Women's History Month about famous and not-so famous women who have left their mark in the world.
The art project began last year, with 20 children from the fourth and fifth grade classes participating. This year, the third grade class showed an interest. That necessitated more women to learn about, said social-emotional learning teacher Tawney Crowley.
"We wanted to do something for Women's History Month, but you usually have the same people who are typically covered, and that's great, but there are so many other people that we don't learn about."
Some of those people included Alaskans like Riddles, the state's chief medical officer Dr. Anne Zink and the late Alaska Native rights advocate Elizabeth Peratrovich.
Crowley spent a weekend scouring the internet for photos of nearly 50 women to add to last year's 20. Then she used a drawing program to trace the photos and make each into a coloring book-style picture that students could fill in. She posted the portraits throughout her classroom and instructed to students to peruse pictures to see which ones caught their interest.
"I told them, in this case, judge a book by its cover," Crowley said. "Find a person who looks interesting. They just randomly picked their person."
From there, students looked for actual photos of the woman they had picked to accurately color in the portrait. At the same time, they were charged with researching the person to find out more, especially facts not commonly known.
Third grader Malachi Harrison, 8, said he picked Claudia Gordon because she looked interesting. By the time he was finished with his project, he learned that Gordon was born in Jamaica and became the first deaf black lawyer in the United States. He also learned that she was a key adviser to President Barack Obama on disabled people. "It was different than what I expected," Malachi said.
Fourth grader Claire Rooney, 10, picked Ruby Bridges because Claire cares about children. Bridges, now 67, was memorialized as a child in photos (and a painting) when she was the first African American child to integrate an elementary school in the South, the William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.
Fifth grader Angus Booker, 11, chose author Beverly Cleary. Upon learning that her favorite color was purple, Angus made the choice to use that color in the background of his portrait. Cleary, who wrote books including "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" and "Ramona's World," surprised Booker with some other facts.
"One thing that astounds me is that she lived to be a centenarian. That's a person who lives to be 100 or more. She died at age 104," Angus said. Cleary's writing inspires Booker's own creativity, he said.
It wasn't just the students who learned something new from the project.
"I feel like as I was picking people, I was learning a lot about people I didn't know existed at all or I was learning a lot more about people I thought I understood," Crowley said. "I used to live in Tennessee where Dolly Parton is really popular. Her name kept popping up. I was like, 'Oh, my gosh! She does so much more than just music and television.'"
Crowley said she and other teachers have discussed broadening the same project to other areas such as Black History Month and Indigenous Peoples Day. Her hope is that kids in Wrangell will see that no matter a person's background or where they come from, they can go on to accomplish great things.
Plus, she likes that kids are showing an interest in one of her favorite subjects.
"I'm a huge history buff," Crowley said. "It's cool for me to see these kids get invested in history or in people that still exist."
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