Teaching and Learning Opportunities with Make Meatballs Sing

By Denise Dávila on Behalf of the Biography Clearinghouse

Regarded as The Rebel Nun, the Pop Art Nun, and Andy Warhol's Kindred Spirit,  Sister Corita Kent (1918–1986) was a member of the Immaculate Heart Community of Los Angeles, California.  She created multimodal art prints that were social commentaries on poverty, injustice, and war.  As the artist of "The Rainbow Swash" (1971), the largest copyrighted rainbow in the world, and the designer of  US Postal Service's best selling "Love Stamp” (1985), Sister Corita also used her art and her voice to promote the kind of hope, love, and kindness that overcomes barriers and unites people. 

In the highly acclaimed picturebook biography Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent (2021, Enchanted Lion Books), author Matthew Burgess and illustrator Kara Kramer engage readers in a multimodal exploration of an extraordinary person’s life and legacy that resulted in nearly “800 serigraph editions, thousands of watercolors, and innumerable public and private commissions” according to The Corita Art Center of Los Angeles, CA. Learn more about Corita Kent at:  www.corita.org.

The Biography Clearinghouse entry for Make Meatballs Sing includes and interview with Matthew Burgess and several recommendations for working with the book. Below is an excerpt of the teaching ideas in the entry.

Free Curriculum Guide

Using Viewfinders

Sister Corita Kent authored provocative multimodal compositions that were inspired by looking closely at ordinary objects and were imbued with intertextual meanings.  As suggested in Make Meatballs Sing, much of her work began by focusing her attention on specific elements and blocking out others.  She employed cardboard viewfinders with her students as tools for developing the skill of looking.  These next activities build upon the use of viewfinders in the classroom.  They are adapted from the Make Meatballs Sing Curriculum Guide.

If you have 1 - 2 hours

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Make and Use Viewfinders
Invite students to make viewfinders, like those Sister Corita Kent asked her students to create, from everyday materials like recycled cardboard, heavy paper, or cardstock. Encourage students to use their finders to examine things in their classrooms, schools, homes, neighborhoods, and other venues.  Take a walking field trip in the vicinity of the school to take a closer look and find unexpected surprises. After returning to the classroom, invite students to write about what they noticed and to discuss their experiences in looking and seeing in a different way.  

If you have 1 - 2 days

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Develop a Scavenger Hunt
Invite students to develop a scavenger hunt for another looking tour.  Welcome them to generate ideas for their types of objects, shapes, attributes, or other elements they should look on the tour. For example, students might search for things that are green, billowy, jagged, smooth, angular, etc.  Encourage students to bring a sketchbook to capture the images they find during the scavenger hunt.  Alternatively, they could use digital cameras to document their findings.  Upon returning to the classroom, encourage students to identify their favorite "find" from the hunt and to contribute it to a class collage.  Students could collaborate in the creation of a visual patchwork akin with the art collage that appears on the back jacket of Make Meatballs Sing.

If you have 1 - 2 weeks

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Create a Multimodal Composition for Screen Painting  
Invite students to use their findings from their scavenger hunts to create multimodal compositions that incorporate images and texts.  Present an array of Sister Corita’s prints as models.  Encourage students to incorporate epigraphs or quotes from texts that are meaningful to them. Alternatively and/or additionally, invite students to create images based on their looking exercises that could be used for a simple screen painting project.  Several resources are available online for creating serigraphy with students.  Here is one approach that uses embroidery frames.

Denise Dávila is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies children’s literature and researches the home literacy practices of families with young children in under-resourced communities.