Starting May 7, the High Desert Museum welcomes the eighth annual “Kids Curate,” a youth art program run by the museum displaying students’ artwork from a rotating list of local schools. The program invites students to learn about a new topic within science or history every year, and to create an art project based around what they learned. Curators at the museum work with these individual schools in both classroom lessons and field trips to help students learn about their subjects and create the exhibition.

This year, fifth graders from R.E Jewell Elementary learned about how plants and animals get energy from the sun. Each individual class was assigned one specific habitat, full of flora and fauna to study, and then students created drawings to illustrate the scientific processes they studied. These drawings will be on display in the museum after they are laser etched into plexiglass tiles and arranged into a large mosaic.

The program was conducted completely virtually this year until about mid-April, when the students resumed their in-person classes. The curator of education at the museum, Carolyn Nesbitt, expressed her happiness in how this year’s students adapted to the new online format.

“We are so proud of how the students embraced this program in an online format this year. We all have the ability to examine plants and animals in our own neighborhoods, and the kids explored and embraced not only the assigned habitats, but also what’s right out their own front doors,” Nesbitt said.

This one-of-a-kind display provides students unique learning opportunities, a chance to connect their school lessons with the environment around them and the opportunity to publicly and proudly display their work in a museum. Click here to take a look at last year’s exhibition, created by fourth and fifth graders at Roseland Elementary in La Pine. For ticket and admission info, click here.