Tonight's picture was taken in June of 2004. Though Mattie wasn't a baseball fan, he did faithfully wear his Red Sox hat because he knew how much Peter loved this team. I can not recall why Mattie had this somewhat unhappy and serious face at the time, but something compelled me to snap a picture. Notice in Mattie's right hand was a sippy cup. That cup was practically attached to him at all times and he drank milk like it was going out of style. One would have thought that he would have grown up with the healthiest of bones. Bone cancer would never have entered my mind!
Quote of the day: At different stages in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at heart the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds. ~ Michael Dorris
Thanks to Patches, my cat, I had the worst night of sleep possible. She basically was howling throughout the night. At 2am, it was so loud, it woke me up and I couldn't get back to sleep. So I was operating today on very little sleep and with a migraine.
Despite the start to the day, the first kindergarten art session was a HUGE success. I was fortunate to have my friend Christine (Campell's mom) helping us in the classroom. With Donna (the teacher), her assistant Ashley, Christine, and I, there were four adults to 15 children. It provided the right amount of supervision and guidance for the hands on activity.
We covered a lot of territory today. I started out the morning by asking how many children viewed themselves as artists? With a show of hands, only about four children responded positively. I had several messages that I wanted to get across today, and they were: 1) There is an artist within all of us. If we understand shapes, colors, and use our imagination, then art is possible. 2) There is NO right or wrong way to create art. 3) We all have our own feelings and thoughts, which make us unique. Therefore the art we create is also unique and special because of our own perspective we bring into it. 4) Certain colors evoke certain feelings for each of us. However, we may not all react the same way to a certain color, and this is once again due to our unique feelings and how we learned to associate certain colors with certain feelings.
The children had the opportunity to see color and feelings operationalized in two ways. I taped a color to Donna's back and then one to Christine's. Neither adult knew which color I taped to her. I then asked the children (who could see the color) to help Donna and Christine figure out which color they had on their backs by describing how the color made them feel. Based on the feeling descriptions the adults had to guess the color on their backs. What this exercise proved was that we all associate a color, like red, with an emotion. However, the emotion or the feeling was NOT the same for each child. Some viewed red as happy and excited and others viewed it as angry and mad for example. This exercise set the tone for the day. Which was, we all enter the classroom with our own feelings and perspectives. We respect those differences and can appreciate how these differences influence the art that we create.
I then read to the children the wonderful Dr. Seuss book entitled, My Many Colored Days. Dr. Seuss did a wonderful job of associating colors with feelings, and at the end of the book, it is illustrated that we all have a rainbow of colors (or emotions) within us. Some days certain colors are more pronounced than others.
I provided the children with a powerpoint presentation of pictures of Picasso, a Map of the World, so they could see where Spain (Picasso's birthplace) was located, a Spanish Flag sticker so we could pretend to be transported to Spain, and many many wonderful child friendly pieces of Picasso art work. I explained to the children about Picasso's blue and rose periods. They found this fascinating, especially the reasoning for these periods. During Picasso's blue period, he painted everything in blue because he was sad. He lost his closest friend in life (through suicide, I did not explain that to the children!), and then a year or so later, he met and fell in love with his first girlfriend, and this transformed his emotions, and in essence his painting to the Rose period. I also explained to the children that Picasso was one of the founders of the artistic style known as cubism. Cubism is a style of painting that does not look like real life. Instead the people and objects are painted using geometric shapes, such as cubes, circles, and triangles. In addition, the people or objects in the painting are shown from many different points of view all at the same time. This is a hard concept to grasp, but with many examples, the children quickly got it. In fact, they were excited, animated, and engrossed in the art. They were standing right beside me, pointing to things they saw in the paintings, and were making relevant observations.
The children then had the opportunity to do a hands on activity. With Peter's help, we transposed the actual outline of a Picasso painting onto four different poster boards. There are four tables within the classroom and each table had a board to paint on. Here is the bare bones outline I provided the children. I did not tell them the title of this painting, nor did I tell them the subject matter. Their job today was to work collaboratively at their table and paint in the shapes they saw on the poster board. This exercise was to help them understand cubism and to see that art is about shapes and colors. 
After the children did their paintings, I then revealed to them the actual painting that coincided with the outline. I did not want to influence their art before they painted! Picasso entitled this painting a Woman in a Hat. Again, you can see that he depicted this lady in geometric shapes and in typical cubist fashion this woman doesn't look real. Also he captured this woman at various points in time all in one picture. Since most of us can't look at something straight on with our eyes and have a moon shaped mouth that appears sideways. So as Picasso was so good at, he used his imagination and combined what this woman would have looked like straight on (eyes forward) and what she would have looked like with her head tilted sideways (mouth sideways).
The first session ended back in a circle. I gave the children homemade empanadas (dough stuffed with apple and cherries), trying to stick with a Spanish theme of the day! Each child then went around and shared a thought about what he or she learned from the session. The responses were priceless and captured exactly what I was hoping which is art is fun, we are all artists, art is about color and shapes, and we can work together with friends to create art! Excellent, I was thrilled to hear these responses. Then each child came up to me, shook my hand and said thank you in their own way to me. In a way, I wasn't expecting this, but this was a very tender gesture. Holding the hand of a six year old instantly reminded me of who I was missing in my life.
As the children left the room to head to science class, Christine and I were introduced to this fascinating technology called Voicethread. With Voicethread you can capture voices and share them over the Internet. Our goal is to interview the children about their art and use this technology. Christine and I practiced today and Donna sent me our practice link below. When you click on the link, you will hear three things. The first is a portion of the session that Donna actually video taped of me talking to the children. The second part is a question I posed to Christine, and the final part is Christine's response. Christine worked hard at her table, and the observations she made as she helped the children with this assignment were exactly what we were hoping to accomplish!
http://voicethread.com/#q.b1892612.i0.k0
A VoiceThread is an online media album that allows a group of people to make comments on images, videos, and documents, really simply. You can participate 5 different ways - using your voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam). It's easy to control who can access and comment on a VoiceThread, which makes it a secure place to talk about almost anything: business and academic presentations, travelogues, family history, art critiques, language study, tutorials, book clubs and digital storytelling. A VoiceThread allows an entire group conversation to be collected from anywhere in the world and then shared in one simple place.
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