Gary Every sat in front of Christa Badorek’s lower elementary school class at Sedona Charter School on Dec. 10, reciting to them his rendition of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” — Sedona style.

“What do my wandering eyes see appear but a miniature sleigh and eight chubby javelinas,” Every recited.

Because Badorek’s class was learning about the history of writing and reading, she thought it would be a wonderful idea for Sedona’s first poet laureate, who has a background in anthropology, paleontology and geology, to come and work with the students.

“I want them to put together the rational science mind with the creative mind,” Every said. “You can stuff your head full of natural science and still let the imagination fly places.”

Every taught on several Wednesdays through the semester, working with the children to come up with creative ideas for what the future might look like.

“He’s told us poems and we make our own poems,” 9-year-old Flint Jones said “Last time, I wrote about what I would do if I was a caveman.”

He said if he were a caveman, he would cook.

The time before that he wrote about what he would do if he were a geologist.

“Most of the stuff we use is made out of metal,” he said. So if he were a geologist, he’d want to mine metal.

Penelope McCombs, 9, said her favorite poem that she wrote with Every was the one about the dinosaurs.

“My poem was about a pterodactyl who survived the meteor and had to move somewhere else because he couldn’t survive there,” she said.

Badorek said she reads Shel Silverstein to her students regularly because he’s her favorite poet and the children enjoy his poems. She said Every does the same thing and can get them even more excited about poetry because of his personality and how he interacts with the kids.

“This is my second year with them [Artist in the Classroom],” Every said. “I used to get grants from Gardens for Humanity, and when they had a program for us, and I did that for a couple years, too, before COVID.”

Every said the kids’ excitement is his favorite part about working with the kids, too. When they’re excited, they shine.

“They’re not getting graded on these assignments,” Every said “They’ve got to do it because they think it’s worth it, and without the pressure of grades, they kind of buy into that.”

Sedona Arts and Culture Specialist Nancy Lattanzi, who organizes the city’s Artist in the Classroom, said she inherited the program from when it began in 1989 and was super excited when she learned about it.

She comes from a background of elementary teaching in New York and art was a heavy influence for her teaching style.

“I was trained in Reggio Emilia, which is in Italy,” she said. “What you do is you observe students, and you observe what their interests are and what their play is, because they’re so young, they’re not writing or reading yet, and then you create a curriculum based on what their interests are.”

She was teaching a preschool class in New York in 2001. Classes began right around the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The kids came into the classroom playing with blocks and knocking them down, pretending to be terrorists.

“I said, ‘all the curriculum, we’re going to rebuild,’” Lattanzi said. “It wasn’t like a metaphor and symbolic.”

The students used all different art forms throughout the school year to build buildings and neighborhoods including cardboard, clay and sketches.

She took a field trip to the office of Maya Lin, the architect who designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“She has a whole set of people that were sitting at computers designing, and she brought out some of her models about ‘what you have to have as an idea,’” Lattanzi said.

Lattanzi said throughout the year she saw the students grow and continue the theme of rebuilding in their school work in all aspects.