The last two weeks have been pretty productive, thanks in part to the lovely Spring-like weather. With no sudden, unexpected snow days, I managed to finish screen-printing all 1 million of my products (Well, it certainly felt like 1 million!). I have also almost finished ironing them all as well. My right bicep is now impressively larger than the …
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 …
…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 …
I have approximately 20 minutes to write this blog post before I have to pick up my four year old from preschool, so the spelling, and the grammar, and perhaps even the meaning of this post may be muddled. Well, maybe not the spelling – I am a star speller, always have been, it’s my …
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 …
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!
Unfortunately, today’s blog will not be about my favorite TV series, Sherlock, or the splendid Mr Cumberbatch, I just like a good play on words. I have mentioned before that I am a trained middle and high school teacher. Teaching middle and high school Art is something I adore doing. I especially revel in the …
I apologize for the snow days. Yes, it was in fact my fault, and I won’t do it again. About two weeks ago, I strutted online and proudly announced that I was back on track and ready to get into my work routine again, thus tempting those pesky gods of fate to dump large amounts …
