mural planning session: what a bummer

Wow. Jessie and I just had a really disheartening experience at a nearby elementary school. The school has contracted us to design and paint a mural with students in their auditorium. It's a project I'm really excited about, partly because we want to do a mural in some capacity, but we don't have the funding for one. I'm also excited because the school is really close to our center, and I'm looking forward to building relationships with some of the kids there through this project. And hopefully, some of them will come take classes at our center once they're familiar with us.

owls

I love them all:

http://www.thecraftycrow.net/2010/11/owl-crafts-for-kids.html

Curriculum planning for next term

I came up with a theme for our winter term classes—Transformation--because winter is a time for hibernating and reflecting on yourself and changing. It's also broad enough to include lessons about social justice and positive change in the world.

I've been thinking about the types of classes I'd like to teach and came up with a list of possibilities.

• Recycled art (again)
• Exploring color
• Sharing our stories (Studying different modes of storytelling—books, scrolls, making spoken word recordings)
• Cultures of the world (through their art)
• Printmaking
• Exploring light (working with translucent objects, painting on glass, stained glass, lanterns, etc)
• Puppetry
• Mural class

recycled books

cutest best art show

I've been bad about updating recently because we've been frantically preparing for our Fall Term Celebration, which was today. It went so well. We had an art show in our gallery space, which will be up for about a month, of all the student work from the semester. We also had dance performances from all the dance classes. The Visual Arts teachers had an award ceremony, where we gave out certificates to certain kids. I actually made a different award for each of my 2-5 year olds, so they'd all get one. The awards I gave were: Best Artistic Vocabulary, Best Listener, Teacher's Helper Award, Most Improved Technique, Fearless Artist Award, Artistic Intuition Award, and Creative Energy Award.

The celebration was well-attended, so all of our hard work calling people and advertising in the window and on the sandwich board worked. The kids were very proud of all their work, which was the point after all. The work speaks for itself, so here are a ton of photos.