At Sundown Lane Elementary School, fifth-grader Johnny Donais is exercising both the left and right sides of his brain.
The left side - the side that handles analytical thinking - is used when learning science and math. He especially likes the math because "I can do each question in my head," he said. "It's pretty easy."
He got to exercise the right side of his brain - the side creativity stems from - when his teacher Jeane Miller had her students made papier-mch sculptures recently.
She's a fifth-grade teacher of social studies, reading and art, and the papier-mch lesson followed other art projects such as making mobiles and paper sculptures that protruded from paper bases.
For the kids to make papier-mch sculptures, she added water to a dry papier-mch mix, turning it runny and gooey. The kids dipped newspaper strips into the ooze and laid them onto wadded up paper to dry and harden in sculpted forms.
The fifth-graders made ducks, turtles, flowers and people.
"You get to get messy. It's kinda fun," said Donais, who made a rocket.
He came up with the idea by fiddling with some newspaper and rolling it into a tube that resembled a rocket booster.
"I was just thinking, and I saw this tube-like deal, and it gave me the idea," he explained.
After the gluey globs dried, the students were to paint them, which ought not to have been as messy a process.
"Unless we're doing squirt paint," classmate Chris Harber said.
Squirt paint, he explained, is where you squeeze the paint onto a palette from within a tube. Not that squirting is the technique for the actual painting, mind you, but the way classmate Andy Hagan grinned and mimed squirting a tube of paint directed at a friend showed how the process might provide the temptation to make a mess.
Still, nothing seemed messier than the temptation of papier-mch goo.
"He tried to glue his hands together," Hagan added, pointing at Harber.