Brownwood News – Are you prepared for your future? Signs asking the question, along with pictures of mazes, presented the colorful words with a solution of success for those attending the Brownwood Middle School Elective Showcase. On Thursday, March 21st, students and their instructors displayed the latest and greatest results coming out of BMS. The choir performed, “This Is Me,” an inspiring song from the musical, “The Greatest Showman,” and the band performed for a packed gymnasium. Meanwhile, in the cafeteria, a wide variety of colorful projects entertained visitors, as teachers and students displayed work from the many electives offered at BMS, such as metal tech, woodshop, art, Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA), Audio/Visual, robotics, HOSA (Future Health Professionals), PITSCO (STEM Learning), Tech Apps, Teen Leadership, and Math Counts. Students in the Home Sciences class offered punch and cookies, while a television looped through a student-created news reel.

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Teachers were available to talk with visitors learning about their students’ work, both present and future. Art Teacher Julie Mize works with the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders during their forty-five-minute classes, teaching them the foundations of art and how to create their own unique work. “I spend a lot of time at the beginning of the year on foundations—how to work with lines, what kind of shapes to make certain images,” Mize said. “We do units on color with color wheels and how to mix colors, values, and learning how to do shading. Then after we have the foundations, we go off into other directions and do experimental art. We also do clay, weavings with fibers, all kinds of stuff.” Mize works with the students in a hands-on classroom, where students often show excitement to work with their hands and express their interests. Students in each grade level construct different projects throughout their time at BMS so they will get to create a wide variety of art. The art serves multiple purposes. “There’s a lot of research that says how the fine arts involves different thinking processes, so it allows students to have those different experiences,” Mize said. “Art makes them more rounded students. Their creative thinking gets encouraged.” Mize works with over a hundred students, working with them in a colorful and vivid classroom which encourages not only their critical thinking but their tactile skills as well. “Art is really good for fine motor skills,” Mize said. “If they have problems with that early on, it is something that can be developed throughout the class.” Students have responded well to this years’ projects – masks, collages, weavings, clay work, and paintings, with a collective sigh resounding with the end-of-class bell as students store their materials. “I enjoy seeing them thriving,” Mize said. “I get excited about seeing them excited.”

Greg Owen works with seventh and eighth grade students in the metal tech classroom, teaching them to weld and work with metal through various methods. “As a first-year student, we start off with how to strike an arc, and then I give them a scrap plate,” Owen said. “Once they show me they’re doing well, I let them cut their own plate. From there we practice welding, trying to assimilate (get two pieces of metal together). In the last six weeks we work on projects.” Owen displayed a book full of photos, showing the various projects students have accomplished both in and outside of the classroom. “Last year we did a lot of brands, but students weren’t interested in using brands, so we opened it up,” Owen said. Projects consisted of a swing set, a horse trailer where they had removed wooden panels on the sides and replaced metal bars on the front and sides, horse shoe sculptures, crosses, a bicycle parking rack, shields, a barbeque pit, and even a large chair from a metal barrel. “I don’t see the purpose in them making things they can’t use,” Owen said. “We are working on a forge so the students can work on bending metal. We are trying to improve.” Approximately seventy students, twenty-eight of them second-year students, learn how to safely manage the tools and store them, and how to think creatively while learning a skill which can lead to a career or a fulfilling ability. “Welding can be a good hobby, something they enjoy,” Owen said. “We find a lot of projects on YouTube, or Pinterest, and then recreate them. I hope they learn how to think outside of the box.”

The smell of butter, vanilla, and cocoa flitted through the cafeteria while the Family and Consumer Science students served freshly baked cookies to attenders. “We baked cookies all day today,” Ann Costa said of her students. “They worked really hard and that is part of what they like to do; get in there, get in the kitchen, and have fun.” Costa has taught Family and Consumer Science for fifteen years, teaching students how to deal with life outside of a classroom. “We learn about food, nutrition, child development, babies, interior design, entrepreneurship, housing, the whole gamut.” Approximately one hundred students have opted for FCS classes, in which they practice skills like sewing, cooking, managing a business, and even balancing a checkbook. “The kids like the food projects, and the babies,” Costa said. “At the first of the year we did finance, where they learned how to balance checkbooks and keep track of what they spend. They learned a lot from it.” Also on display were curtains the second-year students have made, as well as backpacks the first-year students sewed. “These have been used!” Costa said. “They had to bring the backpacks back. They learned how to line, how to make a waistband, how to make a straight seam, and a top stitch. It is something they can use.” Another project on display showed how the students were required to build their own food truck business—design a menu, fill out the paperwork necessary to open a food truck, and then even construct a model and showcase what the food truck would look like. All of these projects work together to provide the students with a well-rounded variety of skills to handle life. Costa works with high school-level TEKS in order to prepare her students for life right now and also a varied future after middle school. “They learn how to have a goal,” Costa said, “and they have to work in an order to get it done precisely like it needs to be done or it doesn’t work out right. It teaches them organization.”

The many teachers available at the showcase displayed the hard work these students produce on a daily basis. Through the wide assortment of electives which allow students to work with their hands, to create, and to problem-solve, BMS students follow a daily path toward successful preparedness, guided by teachers and administration aiming to help them be critical thinkers and action-takers. As Costa said, “I want them to be well-rounded students and feel like they can accomplish everything that they want to accomplish.”

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