Being an Atelierista: King of Stuff

notes for the studio

costume for teaching dogs to avoid skunks

A big part of this job is managing stuff. I often come in to the studio in the morning to find a couple of bags of donated items left on my chair or desk. People's Grandmothers clean out their attics/basements/sewing rooms and give me boxes of materials. Parents hand me coffee cans in car pool. My neighbor Pat leaves a nice bag of recycled bits on my porch every now and then. It is nice; this is what we need, but it is a lot of stuff.
Materials are a crucial part of the dance between the children and the school.


I try to keep up with the investigations happening in the classrooms, mapping out things that could happen and the materials that might come in handy. Then, I look for these things, and try to have them ready. This is a delicate matter. When the children are thinking about birds, it is easy to think that a basket of multi-colored feathers might be useful, but what do these things really connote? In the Rainbow room, the bird exploration is a lot about balance of form, while in the Meadow room, communication and stewardship seem to be the most important concepts. 
What materials scaffold these big ideas, and what will provoke further thought and experimentation?

The studio is a place for projects, and also for the exploration of materials (what Malaguzzi called 'messing about'). Other than clay, light, and cloth, I rarely set out an array of materials for children to try, like the teachers in preschool classrooms do. Over the years I have stopped being interested in having big trays of things to glue on paper, or other activities that have children using gobs of stuff to make...anything. I know that the preschool teachers provide thoughtful introductions to glue and paper and other basic media. With so much material available in the studio, and an intention to be as environmentally responsible as possible, I am very watchful for aimless activity.

Instead, I ask the children to use materials toward thinking through some idea. The idea can be anything, as you see from the notes, above. By asking children to start with an idea, and then select materials with which to explore it, I hope that they learn techniques such as cutting, gluing and sewing as well as the affordances of materials. I hope that they also learn to respect materials, to use just enough but not too much. Children experiment with media, maybe, fail and try again, but hopefully avoid duct-taping 50 beads to a piece of origami paper.

a tree

Every day, children come in to make things, or to get something to bring back to their classroom, and I rarely have to say 'no, we don't have anything like that.' That is a hidden part of being an Atelierista that makes me proud. Whether it is a robot brain, some foil for a hat, a waterproof base for someone's tsunami experiment, or material for a Powhatan Cheif's costume, we can usually find it in the studio. 

Sometimes grown-ups tell me they get overwhelmed if the studio looks cluttered. I tend to like the sparkle and shine of it all, but notice if the photos of children making things in the studio have big piles of things in the background.

Really, art studios are supposed to be cluttered, right?  I have to find places for everything, but I also have to know where things are right away if a teacher runs in for blue paper or fishing line right before the children arrive. It is a big job. It's funny that there are a couple of things I can never find, like a big bag of stickers that I've had for years. It's one thing I usually can't grab quickly, but have to dig around for a while to find... those stickers elude me, every time.




The part I love about all the stuff is what can happen in the studio because of it.

a submarine bird

sculpting a character from a story for a reader's response

happy friends in the studio (photo by Miles)

Designing a Bird Machine

B. started to draw this while his friends were working on the mural. He called it a bird machine. 

He designed the whole shape first. He said it wasn't finished, but needed to go eat snack, leaving it in the studio. About a week later I asked him if he wanted to come back and finish it. He brought a group with him, and they talked about the different parts as they colored and added detail.

They talked as they drew, explaining the parts as they made them. I wished I had a recorder, because it was a good example of how children build a common understanding as they play. The bird machine, it turns out, is a machine that makes birds. The birds roll through on a cart, passing through areas where they pick out their own parts. There is also a place for Mother birds to get a bath. The orange lines show heat, which powers the bird machine. Above you can see a 'room' where the birds get their beaks, and the red dots are in a place where they get eyes.

O. had the idea to change the shape a bit to make the whole machine look like a bird. The black shapes in the black area are bird feet, and the colored shapes below are in the 'feather room'. The blue-green lines represent electricity.

Our wonderful Carpenter-about-campus Pippin has offered to cut the machine shape out of wood, and Nancy their teacher gave me this box of machine parts. I hope the boys want to try to build the bird machine for real!

2nd graders

   

            The 2nd graders sing 'Simple Gifts' while they paint the scenery for their play about Pocahontas.

Attention, everyone!

It's a call for submissions from Redwings Nest, a new art and literary magazine for children. They need submissions! I hope it is visible now (I see it just fine). Go to www.theredwingsnest.org for more info.

Feather to Wing; Soaring feels like a soft pillow...

In collaboration with the Rainbow room teachers, the investigation into feathers has continued. The challenge of looking closely and representing individual feathers, and then thinking about how they are part of a bird is challenging for the 4 and 5 year old children in this classroom. The children do not seem to perceive the individual feathers within their pictures and sculptures of birds, no matter how much observation of feathers they have done. They talk about feathers, and flight, and birds, and they represent all of these things beautifully. 

Piaget seems to say that part/whole integration is in place by age 9 and has to do with his ideas of concrete operations and logic. I usually find these kind of development by age determinations to be way off, but in this case the children really don't seem to grasp the relationship between feathers and bird the same way I do, and I want to understand this. That's why I want to keep the children looking at feathers as well as birds. Will more experience speed up their whole/part understanding? 

I'm remembering art school, and reading about the idea of a gestalt...this is what happens to me when I see theory in action in the classroom -I get curiouser and curiouser.   

Last week we showed a small group that I had made a wing, explaining that I didn't think it would fly without any feathers. Could they make me some feathers?

"Anna, you will have to flap really fast. If you flap VERY fast, it will be like a hummingbird.
Q. What part of a feather makes a bird fly? 
L. "The part in the middle, and the feathers (indicates the hairy parts of a feather)"
G. "So, I guess the 'feathers' make the breeze, and the stick makes it move."
N. "The bone (indicates the part in the middle of the feather), it makes (the feathers) flap."

P. told us about a movie where you felt like you were soaring (my word) above the Earth. "You put on a seat belt, then you go into the screen, and they go up, up, and you're looking down at countries."
Q. Do you know the word 'soaring'? 
All of the children say yes, B. puts out her arms as if soaring in the sky. What do you think soaring feels like?

"Soaring feels like flying." P.

B. "(Soaring), it makes the bird rest, and you can even swoop down and come up."

As they talked, the children made feathers. The used paper and straws, clay, and painted feathers using a feather as a brush.






N. "I've been on a plane before."

P. (In the movie) "I was up high... really high, above the clouds."











 Soaring 
feels like a soft pillow.

first grade play scenery

the shetland pony has different coat textures
at various times of the year. The 1st grade pony
has a summer coat.

Garden room children notice the first graders work.

the backdrop

There was some really wonderful activity in the studio this week. These pictures are from the first grade, who are making a play about the middle ages. Here you can see the backdrop, as well as a Shetland pony that the Scottish knights will ride. The boys who are making the pony hope to add mechanics that will make the horse walk. I don't know how to do that, but I hope the first grade boys will help me learn. However, even if we can't figure it out together, there is no doubt that the pony has a lot of personality and will look great on stage.

building

Size and perspective demonstration

I'm sorry this video is sideways. I always forget the you can't rotate the camera when shooting video. But this is pretty great: The children were explaining to me that the sun really is a small star, but it looks big because it's close to earth, and we see it in relation to other things around us. This demonstration shows how things look smaller when they are further away.

A Day in the Life (take 2)

beading together

drawing a giraffe

planning a painting of Mother Nature

painting the bird mural

drawing Rapunzel

investigating tiny bricks

making a 'submarine bird'

just hanging out in the studio

sorry if you got this twice...something happened to all of the photos I posted last night. 

more pictures of mural painting

red-winged blackbird

Before starting on the mural, children did many
practice paintings, using the overhead projector to enlarge drawings of birds. It took several days to make each of these paintings, doing a bit at a time until they were finished.

the school building

Only one child questioned the process of different people using all of the drawings. She felt that each child should only paint their own picture. The other children took it in stride that anyone could paint any image.

filling paint cups

just the right mix of red and brown for bricks

painting one of Georgia's drawings
 (Georgia is a middle schooler who shared a catalog
of the birds on the school campus that she created)

working on the sky