Langston kids use basketball in artwork

Thirteen-year-old Verleshia Roberts likes to play basketball and wants to be a professional artist. That was a good combination of skills for a recent assignment from her 6th grade art teacher.

Verleshia is a student at Langston Middle School in the St. Louis Public Schools.

Verleshia Roberts

Her school was participating in a Middle School Madness curriculum sponsored by the NCAA. The series of classes used information about basketball to form lesson plans for a wide variety of school classes.

The "madness" curriculum is adding lesson variety to local schools and helping to publicize the 2009 Women's Final Four basketball tournament. St. Louis will host the finals at the Scottrade Center in downtown St. Louis Saturday and Monday, April 5 and 7.

Mr. James Reed is the art teacher for 6th, 7th and 8th grade kids at Langston Middle. He had the kids in all three grades working on art projects suggested in the Middle School Madness curriculum.

Mr. Reed's sample poster

Vereshia and her classmates worked on creating Final 4 posters.

Mr. Reed created a sample poster and put it on the blackboard. Then, the kids came up with their own designs which would publicize the upcoming tournament.

Young Saint Louis.com went to Mr. Reed's class early February to talk with some of the kids. YSL.com also wanted to find out how they were getting along with their original designs.

Vereshia decided to make her poster look like a basketball scoreboard that showed one of the teams leading in the game.

She used a variety of different-colored paper to outline the letters and numbers used for the poster's message.

"I love art and I want to be a basketball player," she said.

Vereshia said she does drawings and decorating at her home. Her favorite artwork is a "still-life" picture of a basket of fruit which she did with pencils and chalk on paper.

"I have it hanging in our dining room at home," she said.

Being an artist is just one of the things she wants to do when she grows up. "I also want to own my own business and I want to do things that help others."

Daquane Cole

Eleven-year-old Daquane Cole is another Langston student who combines an interest in both basketball and art.

He said he was on a team in elementary school. There, the kids were divided into teams and played against other teams from their school.

Daquane said he likes to feature faces in his artwork that he does in pencil.

Asked if he can create realistic faces, he said, "If I concentrate. If I take a long time, I can make the face look real."

Daquane's Final 4 poster features a large Gateway Arch.

The poster also includes drawings of trees. Asked the significance of the trees, he said, "They're the trees that are on the Arch grounds downtown."

Like Vereshia, Daqaune has used different-colored paper to add to the variety of colors on the poster. "I'm going to use white paper to add clouds to the scene," he said.

He used black paper for the background and the words were in red-paper letters.

James Boutte'

Thirteen-year-old James Boutte' is another student who likes to do artwork outside of school.

He said one of his favorite drawings was of an African warrior. He did this with pencil on paper.

For his NCAA poster, James cut out hand-drawn figures of basketball players from white paper. Then, he used markers to color in the uniforms and put them as decoration around the lettering of the poster's message.

James said he wants to be a chef when he grows up. He said he already cooks at home and has made lasagna for the family. He said his favorite food is pepperoni pizza.

Courtney Townsend

Twelve-year-old Courtney Townsend is one of the students who doesn't like basketball. "But, I do play kick-ball around the neighborhood at home," he said.

He said he also does some artwork outside of school. But, he said he mostly does "stick figures" with pencil and paper. And he doesn't display any of his artwork around his house.

His hand-drawn primitive figures will represent the basketball players on his class art project. They were to be featured along with the tournament lettering on his poster.

His poster included the name of the tournament along with the date and location of the meet.

Mr. Reed has been a teacher at Langston for nine years. He said the school participated in a "Middle School Madness" curriculum about five years ago before another tournament.

He said the art projects for this year's tournament were more creative than those suggested at the earlier tournament. He said, "In the previous tournament, they wanted the kids to make stick figures out of straw and string."

(YSL.com started its coverage of youth-related activities associated with the Women's Final Four in last month's edition. To read that, click here. Also, YSL.com will have additional coverage in the April edition. Watch for it.)