Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Art takes on its own meaning

Art projects that use to be mostly parent facilitated have recently taken on a very child initiated parent facilitated role. Here are a few recent examples of art work at home.
This is the present that Anjali put together for patti. It began as a home project of using crayons to paint on oven hot stones and seashells - a project that is currently very hot in the internet. You cant see the end resul here, because the stones are packed. The girls later found out that it was patti's birthday and Anjali came up with the idea of presenting the stones to patti.
She asked me to make a box for them and I taped together some cereal box cardboard for the box. She later asked me to cover the bo with colored paper, which I did. She then decorated the wrapper with flowers (visible thgouth the packaging)

Anjali wanted to put ribbon around the package. I was fresh out of ribbon and so we went to the statiooinary shop, where she chose a bow and a ribbon. She returned, wrapped the present in plastic, taped the ribbon and bow on top of it.
Now, i know it may not seem like rocket Science, but this sort of indepdent decision making in art is something that I have only recently seen in Anjali. It involves, not only implementation of a single idea, but planning and evolution and adaptatioin of the plan to suit the available and potential resources. Another example of this will follow
Sophia made this, right after we returned from Brisbane. The pooh stickers are a nop brainer, but what is interesting is the little foam globes in the left. On closer inspection people will find that they are foam balls. It was part of the blessing rice that you through on the newly married couple in aishna and Niranjan's wedding. The girls went around after the muhurtham to collect the foam balls, colorful and interesting that they were. They are using the balls for collages.
I made this skirt for Sophia. Correction, I made this skirt for Sophia a long time ago, most of it was finished six months ago, but for some reason, I left it to sit till last Saturday, when Sopa insisted on wearing a skirt until her toes and I found that I didnt have any in her cupboard. I quickly fixed the elastic on it. 

Anjali got the green eyed monster and wanted a skirt for her right away. "Make it now and finish it today!", she said. At first, I told her that I will check patterns on the internet, but lat asked her to design her own skirt. I drew a pattern on the floor for her and here is the design that she came up with

Two flowers on top, a golden star in the midlde with a red bead, frills at the bottom and a row of overlapping tulle flowers (alternating petals of purple and pink) above the frill. i have yet to start work on it
 Ms Khim had asked parents to cut, over the holid article and pictures on saving the oceans, to go with their theme. As usual, I didnt look at it till after school reopened and Anjali thought that it would be a nice project to make a poster. Here is the poster she came up with and decorated mostly by herself. The project took her multiple sittings over four days to complete.

 We did recycled newspaper and Anjali put pressed flowers on them
 Some gardening and digging up earthworms in the honor of international mud day


 We made some clay bowls, using two of our own bowls as moulds. After baking, they looked like this. We didnt really use c, but used salf dough baked at 250 for half an hour. Th girls painted them yesterday, but I havent taken photos yet. The girls also made miniature decorations for them - tomatoes, flowers and leaves and painted those. We will probably assemble this evening. Photos to follow

1 comment:

  1. Hey very interesting blog!
    Feel free to visit my blog : art projects for kids summer

    ReplyDelete

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