The adopter, Peter Gorham, writes:

I am curious about this picture and this whole idea of art adoption. I have shared the story with my students and some rather
incredulous adults. I am waiting to receive
the watercolour and intend to open it at school with one of my classes. Thanks to Brece and the FAAN in advance.

November 28 2006
I am happy to report the parcel has arrived. I will take it to school tomorrow and can open it with my students.I am anxious for their responses. Forgive me for mentioning how happy it made me just to receive the package.

Nov. 29th It was a great lesson in reading both art and text, as my class read about FAAN, all our email exchanges and finally Brece's artwork and even the package,ie customs labels and her note (which aided us in our reading and rereading of her piece). The student who caused me to choose this work as a possible adoption, opened the package and read us Brece's note. The whole class was involved and we are going to try to produce similar pieces as a response to artists work. At the end of class today we were brainstorming about possible themes for similar text/poem/artwork.

Dec.1 We worked on our responses to Brece's painting today, finalizing the topics, organizing possible word lists,helping each other by suggesting words and spellings, choosing the words from our lists,creating the list works on scrap and then decent watercolor paper. The works are nearly finished and as soon as "summer list" is framed we will share them with the rest of our school community by puting them on display in the halls.

December 6
"Summer List" is framed and hanging in the hall across from my language arts class, today I took the watercolour to Mrs. Morehouse's grade 2 class, for an art chat This part usually doesn't count as an art class in the eyes of my students, but... they were as charmed by the story as others have been and immediately started responding with stories of memories of summers with grandmothers and the sunny yellow of the picture and the watery paint took us all to the beach, the words - to the grocery storeand the kitchen and the finally "fireflies" -out into the field. We then looked at the work of the grade 5 class that was based on this watercolour and identified with those student artists and their topics. The last half hour we went to the artroom with dictionaries (-a first)and created dry works. using pencils, pens, markers and crayons. Picture drawing as well as word drawing was supported, though most of the time was spent on the word lists. This seems to be a particularly literate class. Topics,I heard about include; "Bunnies","Soccer",
"Hockey", "Animals" - one of which was an encyclopedic naming of every animal the child could think of (74 at last count), and "My Best Sports" was a list of all games. As the students worked, I pulled the adopted works up on the computer and it was fun to see "summer list" on the screen as well as in the room - the original is better and easier to read.
Peter

The artist, Brece Honeycutt, writes:

Peter asked to adopt this piece and wanted to show it to a student in his art class. He thought that the use of text would provide an example that artworks can contain text and/or images. In graduate school, I had a teacher that constantly told me no text. In retrospect, I am not sure if she told me this to spur me on or to stop me. Whatever her goal, it made me more vigilant about using text in my work. I have used text ever since.