So, my resolve to blog at least once a week broke, last week. It just broke apart like a large, warm, flaky, soft, buttery croissant does… mmmmmmmmmm…but I digress, let me tell you more about last week. Last Week Last week it got very cold and snowy, and the kids had just one day of school. Then …
‘Macarons, trampoline, notebooks, unicorn, dancing, bike, box’ The above is a ‘list of good things‘ I found in my work room this morning. It was written by my daughter when she was about six years old, her likes have not changed much over the past two years. In fact, I like all the things on …
“It was a cold and wet December day, when I touched the ground at JFK…” I know how you felt, Bono, I know how you felt. We (me, my husband, and the kids) have been in Disney World (and Universal Studios) for the last six days. It was golden, t-shirt weather. When we got off …
Squeezed for time, once again, this post comes to you from the waiting room of my son’s Occupational Therapist. So I think it only fitting to talk today about how, given my perpetual time crunch, I manage to practice, and teach very, VERY messy art at home without actually destroying said home. Note here that I …
…So, where were we? Oh yes, identifying things that make me happy and, therefore, more productive. I thought about this a lot during the midday preschool pick up/drop off. Here is what I came up with: Start every day by creating something Obvious for an artist, you may say. However, I’m finding that often I get …
…and so the first day of 2015 is here. I promised myself that I would start the year on a good note and put out a blog post on New Years Day, and voila, here I am, keeping that promise – I’ve got a good feeling about this year already. I read somewhere that listicles …
The last summer camp is done, and I’m off to England for my very well-deserved break (Says who? Says I!) feeling tired, bruised, but incredibly happy. I’m going home. I know, I know, Vienna, Virginia is my hometown now, and it is indeed lovely and welcoming, and I like being here. However, there is always that feeling …
Another week of camp has passed, and I’m getting ready for my final, glorious week of teaching before I depart for the UK, and a month of rest and relaxation. I would really like to write a lengthy and descriptive post, like I did last week, but to be honest I’m tired. Knackered – to …
This week’s camp was all about the five senses, so the kids spent a lot of time being hungry (taste, and smell seem to be the all round favorite senses, hands down, no big surprise!).
We looked at Wayne Thiebaud’s heavily textured paintings of cakes and other desserts, and used palette knives to ‘frost’ our own paintings. We learned about Synesthesia, and discussed how artist, Wassily Kandinsky visualized sounds. The kids produced drawings of music, and sat bent over paper furiously scribbling to The White Stripes, Bob Marley, Tchaikovsky, and hot jazz. We learned about color theory and color symbolism. We drew objects, while feeling them, and not looking at them. We gawped at pictures of scarification, and body art, and made a horrible mess working with clay. We made a lot of horrible messes.
The campers loved ‘Lick and Lather’ – Janine Antoni’s chocolate and soap sculptures, and had some amazing insights about her work, which led to a need for an ice cream party (any excuse!). On Friday, we sniffed and identified different scents, and made little scent jars to take home and experiment with.
Yup, a lot happened, and that’s just the art. But, if you ask me, some of the most important learning happened during break times.
On Monday, after a morning of working indoors, I told my students to go out and play in the sunshine – “But, what should we play?” they asked me, “I don’t know, whatever you want to!” I said, “But, we don’t know what to play! they retorted, “This is boring, can you make up a game for us?”.
I refused flatly, and mercilessly threw them out into the wild jungle that is North American suburbia. What happened? Well it wasn’t pretty, there was awkwardness, sulking, whining and a few fights at first, but by the end of the week, the kids were begging for more play time. They made up complex games, hashing out the rules in long, drawn out negotiations, and bonded beautifully. They even organized an end of week performance, made posters by themselves, and practiced relentlessly for it the whole of Friday afternoon.
I think free playtime is really important for kids. Sure, teacher organized play activities have their merits – I often organize games and activities for my students, but I also often step away a lot during break times, and that’s when the good stuff happens.
Who needs a teacher looking over your shoulder all the time? Alone, kids learn to solve problems and counsel one another. Free play fosters the building of skills such as negotiation, team work, conflict resolution, imagination, creativity, and problem posing and solving. My classroom is almost always a better place after a long break. I remember devising so many new games during my long recesses at school, so let’s let our kids get a bit bored this summer, and see where it leads them!
You know, and I know, and those other people over there know, that I have spoken and written at length about the ups and downs of running a tiny one woman business. Well talk about ups and downs – last week certainly had it’s share of both!
To start off with, I ran the smallest, most minuscule, pea sized camp that I have ever agreed to run.
I generally have between six and ten kids in a camp. However, enrollment was really low for my first week of camp this year- only four children were signed up. So I called a meeting (with myself), decided that four was the absolute minimum amount that I could run a camp with, and happily continued with my planning.
On Monday morning, a parent called to cancel – her child was not art-inclined, it seems. Oh dear – suddenly, I was running something that was very un-camplike. It was the Anticamp.
Three kids.
Any teacher, or parent worth their salt knows that three is definitely not the magic number. Two kids is fun, camaraderie, and hours of secret swapping. Four kids is a close-knit unit, an exercise in team building. Three kids is backstabbing, bloodshed and tears. The problem with three, is that no matter what, one child is always left out. I could see hours of conflict resolution unfolding before me….
…then, to my horror, I discovered that my four year old was running a fever, ack! It will suffice to say, I choked back a tear or two.
Luckily, I have a very supportive husband.
I was actually pleasantly surprised. Yes, it was hard work at times keeping the three kids motivated, and cooperative, but we actually got some great work done, and had a lot of fun along the way. We got to do things that we would not have done with a bigger group. We spent longer on projects, and improvised more with our work. Every afternoon we drove to a local playground, and at the end of each day we had a water fight. The kids actually got on pretty well.
Well, I learnt a lot about all the different ways in which insects can kill, maim, and be killed. I learnt more about Pokemon than I wish to know. I learnt that elementary school kids cheat when playing board games with adults, they call it “leveling the playing field” – hmph. I learnt that a good game of Piggy in the Middle is the best bonding exercise for three kids, and finally, I learnt to always expect for the best.
