The MAC t-shirts arrived this week! Taking our class picture wearing our shirts is a celebration of the complicated process that it takes to create this collaborative student-created design.

Each year the MAC t-shirt represents a year of learning through pictures that also have symbolic meaning for MAC students. We begin the process by brainstorming what we have learned…and also share ideas about how we might represent that learning with a picture. Students then sit down with pencil and paper and draft images that ultimately become part of the shirt design.

Here are some sketches that you might recognize from our final design for this year:

The raccoon is representative of the research we did on lagoon animals…and super cute too!

We also learned a lot about the lagoon, brackish water, ducks and their feeding habits represented by the cattails.

The prodigious whale represents the wonder of the ocean and all its inhabitants!

The bird pulling the iPad reminds us of all the ways we have incorporated technology into our studies of the natural world.

And those caterpillars that add up to butterflies conjure up images of the magnificent monarch butterflies and their amazing life cycle that took place right before our eyes (and in front of our classroom) as well as representing the three grade levels that our class contains.

There is ever so much more embedded in the subtleties of our yearly design–ask your child for more detailed information!

Once students generate these images, as teachers, we work to incorporate ideas into one design around the MAC letters.  Third graders recreate this design by drawing the final draft.  Every student adds their name to the back template making this shirt a keepsake to treasure!  The final design is then delivered to Moonlight Screenprinting where Dave helps us with colors and gradients…and then creates the screen to allow the shirts to be printed!

Finally, this t-shirt becomes our costume for the annual MAC musical.  We’ll all be sporting this latest design on June 10th for the 19th annual MAC class performance.  Hope to see you there!