Young at Art

Magic Snowflakes

We made delicate snowflakes out of coffee filters today, then painted them with watercolor.

So pretty! Can you spot the four "sharks" in this one?

During their regular school day, the kids have been learning about recycling, composting, and reusing the things that many people just throw away. We've been integrating this learning into the after school program by doing lots of crafts with recycled materials, like these toilet paper tube owls (and one elephant)!

thankful

Some things my group was thankful for:
"...my life"
"...my friends at school"
"...sisters"
"...the computer"
"...really good teachers"
"...all good things"
"...potato pancakes and chard pie"

I'm pretty sure they were also thankful for the yummy caramel apples Amy made for everyone!

The "Rainbow Fence Project" - Community Beautification with Young Artists

This "rainbow fence project" is the culmination of an ongoing community art project I led in afterschool this semester. The city park behind the school is... unpretty. So, we did a lot of brainstorming about ways to make it lovelier (some more of those ideas will hopefully come to life as well!). Once we settled on this idea, the first step was to get fabric donated, then to sort through the bags of donated fabric and cut it all into strips. Once all the fabric was cut, we sorted the strips into bags by color. After that, we did some planning sketches and scouted the park to chose the panel of chain link fence we would beautify. Then we finally began installation! Here are some photos of getting started...

The rainbow spread quickly with so many little hands installing it!

We got beautiful 75 degree weather on installation day!

We worked all afternoon...

And the finished piece is totally rad.

The kids want to do more projects like this, and came up with a name for their new community art group - they are calling themselves "PEACE" - an acronym for Project for the Enrichment of Arts in the Community Environment. Check out the vocabulary on these kids! The kids took most of the photos, too. I'm so proud.

Group Mandala

I use mandalas in art therapy a lot, but recently I did a giant one with some afterschool kids. Each kid in the group did their own section, and I did the middle (because all the kids wanted to do it and that was "the only way to keep it fair". They worked so hard on it! We hung it in the "big room" - the central space of the school.

I think it's just beautiful.

Autumn Mobiles

Just another example of adorable kid art from afterschool...

Happy Halloween!

Googley eye invasion

The students in after school seriously love googley eyes. It started with a group of 5th grade girls making these little creatures...

But it soon evolved into boys and girls of all ages rushing to the art cabinet to pillage for eyes, then grabbing at glue guns and attaching eyes to various random objects from the "useful junk" shelf. In addition to the puff-ball creatures that started it all, the students have made plastic bottles with eyes, toilet paper rolls with eyes, glass jars with eyes, and on and on.

Copyright MJMnL Craftybits, 11th October, 2011

Seriously, we can't buy enough googley eyes.
I've been thinking about how exciting it seems to be for the kids to anthropomorphise regular objects by adding these eyes - even trash is suddenly precious when it can look back at you. What is it about adding eyes that is so powerful to these kids? Is it particular to this group of kids? Or is there something in all of us that wants to humanize our surroundings?