Creating and Making and Learning!

What do you get when you put about sixty art, science, library, and classroom teachers into a Maker workshop for a week?  Things like this!

An arts-integrated way to study the stars and planets?!  Yes, please! 

(And I made a gif?)

The class is called CreateMakeLearn, and was hosted at Generator in Burlington. The projects folks made were super, like this little wonder:

This Makey Makey water piano was rigged up by my amazing friend Tracy Truzansky, of Vermont Afterschool.  She is in charge of integrating STEM education and professional development for afterschool staff, and was inspired to rig up this marvel in time for her daughter's birthday.

Her enthusiasm is completely contagious!

Okay, I hear you- So, this looks an awful lot like play... what serious, scholarly learning did you do?

The crux of the week was about Design Thinking. Design Thinking has been written about extensively, but what it distills down to is thinking about solving problems empathetically and creatively. We began our week by considering the needs of a specific person, and designing a chair for that person's needs. One group designed for an astronaut, another for an elderly person, another for a rambunctious toddler, and so on. The group was given a list of the user's needs, and followed precise steps to define the needs, develop ideas, and quickly prototype designs. The end goal is to eventually test out a design, then go back and tweak it for the user.

The Chair exercise.

We made out chairs as a group, and every member in the group of five had to make the same design out of a different material. Designs were drawn, cut out of cardboard (no tape!), squished from play-dough, twisted from pipe cleaners, and built out of toothpicks.

Three ideas for a chair for Maggie Simpson.

The best part of the exercise was seeing how other groups responded to their prompts, and the kind and copious feedback participants on one another's designs. It served as a fantastic ice-breaker for a group of adults only just meeting one another.

After that initial all-group morning, we broke off into several days of amazing workshops on tools, materials, and approaches. The first I attended was learning to use a Makey Makey board, which serves as a conduit for attaching everyday stuff to the computer. Anything that is conductive, like Tracy's water cups, or the fruits in the photo below, can be used essentially as a controller to run the computer.

Playing virtual bongos by tapping an apple and a banana!

But what does that have to do with art?  Isn't this a blog about art education? The most amazing connections can be made to an arts curriculum with a tool like this. Sculptures and drawings made by students could be used to operate applications and programs on the computer. Kids could code little games in Scratch, and control them with a drawing. How do you control it with a drawing? Paper isn't conductive! So glad you ask.

First, taking a class like this inspires lots of play and creative thinking. So at night, my sons and I played with the tools I acquired and tried to figure out what was possible. Here, my son made a controller out of paper, pipe cleaners, aluminum foil, and graphite. Graphite, as in pencils.

Watch carefully, and you'll see that when he taps the word "Piano," written in pencil on his paper, it actually plays the virtual piano on the computer. Crazy. So students would be able to make elaborate drawings and tie them into a circuit to control anything on their computer.

Bunny chick!

3D printing has been around a while now, but this was my first time trying out 3D software to design things. The potential art connections are immense, and likely go without saying, as this is the sort of technology used for models, architecture, and many other fields.  I used Tinkercad to create this goofy little toy.

The week was actually full of toys and play. There was a toy-hacking session, which yielded beeping, whirling oddities like this one:

Ben Matchstick, co-deisgner of Pinbox 3000, led us in making our own working pinball machines, out of cardboard. Learning engineering through play?  How natural, and very how missing from our curriculum.

My own city-themed pinball game underway.

The most outstanding quote from the week was from this slide Ben showed:

"Cut twice, measure once. Fail faster."

There is strong focus in my class on flexible thinking and failure as a path to building creative solutions, so this is a brilliant phrase to repeat often to my students. Cardboard is cheap, easy enough to cut, and a perfect avenue to fail-and-try-again.

Did you say cardboard is easy to cut?  Baloney!

Ben showed us what might be my favorite tool from the week. Art teachers, take note: This cutter is a total gift, and practically impossible to hurt yourself with. My students always get exhausted hands trying to cut cardboard with scissors, and xacto knives are a total no-go with my littlest students, so I have ordered a dozen of these, called the Klever Kutter. Amazingness.

The biggest personal learning experience for me during this course was a vastly deepened understanding of parallel circuits. Stop yawning. Yes, you. Electricity adds an undeniable wow-factor to everything students make. A simple circuit with one battery and one LED can light up a single bulb, and in a series circuit you would quickly need more power.  But with one battery and a parallel circuit, look what you can do!

"Press to light up Orion"

This is a huge new thing for me to learn, because electrical project get expensive really quickly, and batteries are pricey. But LEDs are super cheap. My fifth graders study stars and planets, so I am thinking that this could be both a natural tie-in to their science unit, and also could blend into Greek mythology to learn a deeper understanding of the stories attached to our constellations. To do it, my aim to to teach fifth graders how to solder this year- here's the lesson plan I created. I can't wait!

Signage at Pine Island Community Farm

It's hard to sit idle in the summer!  Most every day, I have a paintbrush in my hand for something or other, whether it's to make a watercolor or repaint a bookshelf. But this year I have a particularly fun gig painting signage for Pine Island Community Farm.

My sign frankly pales in comparison to the burgeoning crops behind it.

 As a member worker at City Market Co-op in Burlington, there are lots of great ways that people can connect with the food and farming community in Vermont.  Pine Island is an especially amazing farm, the product of a partnership between the Vermont Land Trust and Association for Africans Living In Vermont. Farm project manager Karen Freudenberger has helped create amazing programs, including the Vermont Goat Collaborative, and more recently, chicken and bee-keeping operations.  Volunteers can also help feed baby goats. You read the correctly. You can help feed baby goats, and play with them. I recommend it.

The Gathering Space

I've been given broad creative license in making signage for the farm, and I loved making this seven foot Welcome sign for the Gathering Space, which gets used by the farm members for community dinners and events.

The reality of the farm's work is not lost on me- their mission is to supply food, and to allow people to farm their own plots with native crops such as amaranth, spicy peppers, and eggplants.  Part of that mission means that the animals they raise are going to be eaten as well, hence this sign:

That's right. A community slaughter room. It's a DIY operation, and not for the faint of heart, to select and butcher your own goat when you visit the farm.  The awesome part is that these goats are castoffs from goat dairy operations, and instead of being killed immediately following their birth, are not wasted but instead raised to adulthood on the pastures next to the Winooski River, and are used to feed members of the new American community in Vermont. And, very importantly, this marvelous farm allows new Vermont refugee families the chance to continue their family traditions of gardening and farming traditional foods.

Even if you are not a co-op member, you should consider a visit sometime to this pastoral beauty. You'll know just where to leave your car.

Keith Haring Lower Gym Mural

Sometimes schools get into a bit of a bind in terms of space. That's why teachers are constantly moving classrooms, even teaching out of trailers and off rolling carts. One space issue that EES has been confronting is Physical Education space on rainy or cold days. The EES gym is multipurpose, and gets used for lunch each day.  On rainy days, that means that P.E. classes go to the Lower Gym. For a long time, this is what the lower gym has looked liked:

Geesh.

Not the most inspiring athletic space. It  has no windows, and we couldn't redo the floor, and some ceiling tiles still need replacing.  But kids are flexible, so they make it work.  And The Most Flexible and Kind Colleague in the World, P.E. teacher Tyler Sessions, has made it work. But the idea that this has been her workspace for years made me, well, a little sad.

So, we hatched a plan. The kids would repaint it.  It wouldn't change the facts of the space, but art has many jobs. Sometimes, art fixes things.  Sometimes, art draws attention to problems that need fixing, by initiating a conversation.

Few artists in history have done that as well as artist and activist Keith Haring. His work straddled the worlds of street graffiti and fine gallery art. But in all of it, he worked to use art as a vehicle to engage his viewers in conversations on difficult topics.

Keith Haring, 1986, Logo against Family Violence

His work was a terrific jumping off point for students. Immediately accessible, colorful, energetic, and easy to relate to. Students used his style as the starting point for sketching dynamic, physically active figures.  Everyone submitted an idea, and the grade voted on their favorites to become part of the finished work.

After the work was chosen, seventeen figures in all, students and I prepped the walls by painting big washes of background color and transferring sketches to the wall with the help of an old-fashioned overhead projector. And then, they painted!

And painted...

and painted...

and painted...

and painted!

It was marvelous to see students so excited to change their own environment, working together.  To make it a little better, and to draw attention to the space.

The finished work was outlined, motion lines added.

Mrs. Sessions has been raving about her revamped classroom, and kids are enjoying it tremendously, too, trying out mimicking the poses they painted. Here are the talented artists!

And the lovely Mrs. Sessions, top left, (grinning!) in her repainted classroom.

Leaving their world better than they found it:

"Art is not a thing, it is a way." 

-Elbert Hubbard

Energy! Wood Sculptures on Physics Concepts

Fourth graders here at EES do a unit of study in their classrooms on potential and kinetic energy. What better classroom-to-art room connection than to bring in the fabulous Alexander Calder to the conversation, as a jumping-off point?

Students looked at his mobiles and stabiles, and considered how his work used energy. In their own work they were charged with the job of "evidencing your understanding of potential and/or kinetic energy through an abstract wooden sculpture."

It's funny how with some kids, that problem statement is broad enough to be actually upsetting, because there was no "right" answer. Hands went up, right and left, all asking basically the same thing: "But what should it look like?!"

"Well," I kept saying, "I don't know exactly how yours will look. It depends on how you choose to make it."

For other students, this was exactly the kind of problem they love.  The tools. The tinkering. The open-ended problem-solving over a dozen iterations of their design to create stored energy or actual motion.

"But what if I am afraid to use the tools?"

It's true, we used real tools. Handsaw, hot glue guns, sandpaper, wire snips, dowel cutters. And a drill. I didn't tell students that they had to use all of the tools, (but most chose to) but they did have to find a way to cut and assemble their design. With lots of support, safety checks, and guidance, students quickly grew to feel comfortable with these tools.

One of the most exciting parts to me is the number of young artists who, due to their new interest, decided to take an after-school woodworking class with Sawmill Studios.

Did all of the artworks function as the artist planned?  Of course not, that isn't how design work usually goes, especially not on the first few tries.  But eventually, artworks all around the room were rolling, springing, and spinning into motion.

The parts of this project which were especially marvelous were that:
 1) each artwork was significantly different than any other,
 2) students took it so seriously and were so invested that there were virtually no management issues,
 3) it was wonderful to see students flexibly try so many variations of an idea instead of mentally committing to a design and being unwilling to change it, and
 4) students gained comfort and confidence in a new and challenging medium.

Students loved it, and asked to work with wood again, so for next year the main change I would make is that I am buying a small vise!

Crazy Colors Lidded Coil Pots

This year I have really missed teaching sans kiln.  Kids love clay so much, and it's a material that offers so many benefits to strength and fine motor skills.  I can offer airdry clay and tons of play-dough, but the working properties are quite different. Throwing on the wheel at BCA is also super fun, but what I would really like to focus on more is clay handbuilding in the lower grades.

These gorgeous, vivid vessels were made by grade 2

The work above is made from Model Magic air-dry clay, which comes in both primary and neon colors, which yield a rainbow of exciting hues when mixed.  No glaze needed for color, but also not food safe since they are not actually ceramic.

The cost of airdry clay is no joke, either. While a 50lb box of clay costs around $17, a 2lb tub of Model Magic goes for about the same price. Once a clay program is in place, the costs of running it are quite manageable.

News which took me by surprise last month is that BCA is moving their art studios out of downtown before the end of the year, due to structural safety concerns and construction at Memorial Auditorium.

If you are thinking that it sounds like a good time for EES to get a kiln, stay tuned!       

I am brainstorming ideas to fundraise next year for one of EES' very own. 

BCA Clay Days!

It was a total pleasure this week to take my third through fifth graders across the street to Burlington City Arts to throw pottery on the wheels!

Each class had this experience thanks to our fantastic Edmunds PTO fundraising to make the trip possible.  Students arrived excited to get their hands dirty and hear expert clay teachers at BCA give how-to's on the basics of throwing on a wheel.

Students practice their "crab claws" to pinch and pull up the side walls with teacher Alissa Faber

Most of my students have been here before- it's an annual school tradition.  This year students could choose to make a basic vessel, such as a cup or bowl. One student made a flower pot, and there were a few vases in the mix as well.

Centering clay is by far the hardest part, so students arrived to pre-centered clay lumps at their wheel, from which they could alter the piece.

Pulling the floor of a bowl.  And such steady, strong posture for throwing!

Every single student made a finished piece. These will be returned to our artists in a couple weeks after they are fired.

You can tell from kids' posture how totally rapt their attention is on BCA teacher Kate.

Students were excellent guests in the space- engaged, polite, respectful of the hundreds of fragile artworks drying on shelves all around them.

This short video really shows how laser-focused artists were. 

What a treat for all of us to go!

A BIG THANK YOU to BCA staff and the Edmunds PTO for making our field trip possible!