reading lunch

Today my big Adobe is reading to Phoenix - I love watching/hearing her read these books to him that I used to read to her when she was much younger. And, the second is bilingual, and she did a pretty good job of pulling off the Spanish pronunciation.

dia de los muertos

Last Friday at Scoop, the kids discussed the Day of the Dead - Dia de los Muertos - celebrations that take place in Mexico every year, the night of Nov. 1, in celebration of loved ones and ancestors. They looked at some images of Day of the Dead masks and then worked to create their own drawing of a skull or scene!

Many thanks to my assistant Cathie, and one of the mommas, Zette, who scrounged some materials and pulled off this lesson with the kids while I had a major transportation delay and could not make it in time for class.

drawing to music at Art Works

I am totally psyched to say that as of last Thursday, I have joined the family of super awesome educators at Art Works Studio School in Mt. Rainier, MD (I have written before about how much I love this place!), and I jumped right in the same day, filling in for a drawing class.

The kids had a great time drawing to music while experimenting with mark-making, using charcoal, graphite, and chalk pastels.  We talked about all the different types of marks you can make on a paper - horizontal, vertical, diagonal, narrow, wide, very wide, dark, light, dots, 'flicks', circles, dots, dotted lines, broken lines, zigzags, squiggly lines, curly qs, smudges, marks with your fingers, letters, and so on.  The music alternated between two stations on Pandora - Thievery Corporation and Mozart - and the kids paid attention to where in their bodies they were feeling the music and how it made them want to move, how it made them want to draw, whether or not it influenced what they drew.

kids in process - black & white

  

a few finished pieces

 

working larger and in color, using their bodies more

 

really getting into drawing in rhythm with the music 

 

Innovative P.E. with Coach Raymond

   This is a super awesome p.e. class that Phoenix, and often Diin, take on Tuesdays. Coach Raymond is absolutely ebullient, so full of energy and enthusiasm, and so innovative in the games and exercises he does with the kids. Every week he brings different 'props' - various balls, cones, ropes, nets, parachute, etc. His set-ups are like works of art.
   The other thing I like so much is  that he engages not just their bodies, but their minds as well.

mixed media stories - week 4

   These kids are awesome, I love working with them. They are so focused and 'on it'.
   Today most of them finished up their 'scenes' from last week, painting them with gouache. (A couple here are still in-progress.)
  

The next assignment is to purely play around with the paint - watercolor and gouache - creating textures and fields of color, experimenting with puddles, drips, runs, bleeds, taking their paper out in the rain, just filling the page with color with no specific imagery or story in mind. Next week they will 'daydream' on their painting, rotating it and looking at it in different ways, and see what pops out at them, a face, an animal, a setting, and work from there, allowing their painting and imagination to reveal a story to them...