the beginning of the end

here we are, almost ten months later, and definitely not enough blog entries to account for it. or journal entries in my own personal journal for that matter.

today was the last day of in-school. i hate to say it, but it was a little anti-climatic.
1) we're still going back to run our afterschool program for the next two weeks
2) we're running a field day at the school on june 13
3) the kids know they're still going to see us.

i made star shaped brownies (yeah reynolds fun foils) for them because they are all stars. corny. also one of my students increased his score on the grade test from fall to spring by 17 points.

it was a good day. calm and we spent a lot of time outside. i went to gym and learned about golf clubs and went to art and drew awful still lifes of various fruits for all my students. it was the least i could do for them.

my eyes are throbbing

if there was a way to guarantee a restful night, i would be all over it.
last night i didn't even sleep through an hour of the night - between my hamster and thinking that it was time to wake up way too many times/hours before i needed to get up. finally i just gave up and came down to eat breakfast.

today is our signature service day.

round two of camp

so, right after i withdrew from my senior corps position for next year -- we had camp. camp was amazing.

i led the VTS (visual thinking strategies) sessions for the kids and it was incredible. we had two days of training at the MFA (museum of fine arts) and then it was off to camp to try it out on real, live children.

the basic concept of VTS is that a child can explore and expose the inner workings of their mind (cognitive development through asthetic awareness?) while they talk about art. sometimes famous art, sometimes not, but always carefully chosen for the age group. in a regular classroom, the art slides go in sequential order and the curriculum takes a year, with three pictures being shown a month.

my roommate's class does it (she is in the 1st grade) at another school and she had told me that all of her kids really enjoyed, but i was unsure of what to expect at camp. the first day the kids were like, this is wack. but once they realized they could say anything and i would repeat and affirm it back to them, they started opening up more to throwing out crazy ideas and making up entire stories for one picture.

in a VTS lesson, you are only allowed to follow this format.

first, you say, let's take a moment to look at this picture. (here you time one minute)
then, what's going on here?
then, what do you see that makes you say that?
then, what more can we find?

the focus is to not guide/lead/influence the comments the students are giving, so you paraphrase every idea. and point. you have to point at the artwork to show that you are paying attention and understand what the student is saying. it may not make sense to you, but you have to validate them no matter what.
asking, what do you see that makes you say that forces them to look for hard, concrete evidence in the artwork for an interpretation that they may have made.

saying we in the last question implies that EVERYONE is working together to find more in the picture. because there is always more.

it was nice to see the quick progression my kids made from the first day to the third day and i was pleased with my personal growth as the facilitator of the activity.

the questions that you ask are supposed to be able to translate to other disciplines as well as the skills that the students learn