First Week at Children's Art Institute

I'm still playing catch up on this blog for the things I've been up to so far with Art Works, so I wanted to tell you what I've been doing at the Children's Art Insitute. I fell in to place pretty comfortably there on Monday because Mr. Burnett works there too, as well as one of my art teachers from Emerson, Deb Weiss. There are two other instructors that work at The Children's Art Institute named Ms. Springer and Mr. Thomas. When I first got there, Ms. Springer showed me how crochet a scarf. I worked on that for most of the morning and then I went help Ms. Weiss, who was helping the kids make sculptures out of clay. As you can imagine, that was pretty messy. Clay got on almost every surface imaginable. Mr. Burnett's kids were drawing from How-to cartoon books. I worked on a drawing of an idea for a dress that I'd had. Mr. Thomas' kids worked on collages.
On Tuesday, I worked with Ms. Weiss making "abstract" sculptures out of recyclable materials like cardboard tubes, plastic bottles, and styrofoam with the kids. We all came up with pretty interesting ideas. Most of our sculptures looked like alien landscapes. Almost all of us used the little plastic googly eyes that Ms. Weiss had found, making our sculptures even more far out. On Wednesday, me and some of the kids painted our recyclable sculptures and the clay sculptures from Monday. The paint was even messier than the clay. We had to start clean-up early that day because painting was such a mess, but I was surprised to find that the messiest kids stepped up and were really great helpers cleaning up their messes.
All of the kids I've worked with, which were elementary school aged, seemed really bright and creative. I haven't worked with the older kids yet, but most of them seem pretty focused on drawing with Mr. Burnett and have made some really nice work. All of the kids have a lot of potential, even though some of them are busy-bodies.