And so, the first week of this year’s summer camp has come to pass. I should have written this on the weekend, but I was exhausted, and chose to binge read Howl’s Moving Castle instead (excellent book by the way), take long naps, and drop in on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which is happening right now on the Mall.
This is the first time that I have left a gap between two weeks of camp, and I’ve got to say…. I like it!
Doing a camp the first week of the summer vacation was tough on both myself and the kids, they were exhausted from school, and I was bitter about having to still pack lunches. So, we took it a little easy, and followed our instincts. A lot of art making was done, but we also took very long breaks to play frisbee, nap under trees (the kids, not me – honest!), play monster games of Apples to Apples, and listen to Percy Jackson quietly. Summer is, after all, a time to decompress, and process, and I think the week was pretty well balanced.
The week’s theme was Food and Art, with a particular focus on cakes and desserts (yum!). We explored work by Joel Penkman and Wayne Thiebaud, and discussed Dutch still life and Hyperrealism. We designed cakes, block printed our designs, studied color theory, watched OK Go videos on it, and mixed delicious frosting colors with paint. We painted and and piped cakes onto canvas board, and then used our knowledge of color to paint and draw aerial landscapes (which was a bit of a detour from our theme). We drew our dream lunches with markers and pencils, and read some funny picture books about cake. On Friday, we baked mini cupcakes, and pretended that it was still all about art (well, we did use color theory for the food coloring!), but really we just wanted to eat cake! We played in the town green sprinklers, climbed trees, went for walks, and cleaned. We cleaned a lot, poor mites, that’s the downside to painting. Have a look at some pictures I took during the week:
Happy July 4th! I’ll be back with news of the next camp, and my birthday celebrations! Yessss!!!
