It’s only a few weeks into 2024 and already the kids in the Arts & Smarts Program have accomplished a lot!
They’ve used a variety of materials to create a veritable snowstorm across the front of the children’s program area. There are the familiar white paper snowflakes (folding them is always an important life skill to learn!), and there are clear plastic ornaments filled with drifts of glitter and glue. There are beachy white sand dollars dusted with extra sparkly glitter and snowflakes cut from coffee filters that were colored with cool-colored markers and spritzed with water to make the colors run and blend.
Our participants also created miniature scenes in bottles aka: “Dry snow globes.” The scenes were all creative and special. They were sculpted with modeling clay and found objects. Dinosaurs were surrounded by a sky full of red dots. A lady stood with a unicorn. A crocodile relaxed among the flowers. A frog pondered a mushroom.
Going along with the winter theme, our participants created their own scarves and picked out hats and gloves just before our area received a week-long blast of frigid air. One boy later reported, “I’m wearing my gloves today! I love them. I really love them. They’re so warm it’s like I have sunshine in my hands!”
Denise, an origami expert, came to show us how to fold paper airplanes. After everyone made a plane, sent it on some test flights, and fine tuned their designs, we had a spirited competition to see whose airplane would fly the farthest across Patchwork’s big room.
Folks from the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library visited and brought mini robots with them. Our participants drew mazes for the robots to follow and coded special instructions for the robots into the lines to tell them to do things like speed up or slow down or spin around. At the end of the afternoon, we put all of our mazes together to create one giant challenge course for the robots.
And most recently our participants have started a study of this semester’s Famous Artist: Faith Ringgold. One piece of Ringgold’s art is the story and illustrations for her children’s book Tar Beach.Tar Beach is a semi-autobiographical story about a girl who dreams of flying over the city of New York and making the world better through her flight. We watched a video of Ringgold reading her book. Now everyone is creating ceramic buildings that we will put together to make a community. Once the buildings are done, we’ll paint images based on our own memories. They’ll be informed by Ringgold’s artistic style and her use of quilt blocks as framing devices.
With all this going on in the first month of 2024, who knows what we’ll accomplish in the rest of the year! No matter what, it’s guaranteed to be fun and exciting.
