Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Ward Hobbs is back in the studio!


The studio is up and running! This week in Ward-Hobbs we are focused on observational drawing using some natural materials from the playground as inspiration.
I set out graphite pencils 6B, white prisma colors, and black pens. No color. One of the children asked me for some green and I said what do you see on the table that we might be able to use. She discovered a green tomato leaf and we tried rubbing it on the paper.
I had placed some grapes on the table as well, from the outdoor arbor, and one child discovered that she could remove the purple skin and rub that onto the paper for a violet hue. 

Another child chose some sunflower petals and exclaimed, “It works! It is a very faint yellow Angelina but it IS yellow.” And it was indeed.
The resulting drawings were beautiful and subtly infused with natural colors.

XP Corner:
The Ward-Hobbs XP class is beginning a writers workshop and story telling unit. The teachers and I agreed to begin with a studio inquiry inspired by ancient cave paintings.

The XP children joined me outside where we talked about our ancient ancestors living in caves and telling stories inspired by the things that mattered to them: community, animals and the hunt. And in order to write their stories they didn’t use an alphabet emulating sounds, rather they drew pictures. Pictures tell a story!

We discussed the limitation of materials our ancestors had at their disposal and agreed to write our picture stories on brown paper (no caves nearby) using three shades of watered-down clay (a gray, red and white) and charcoal. 

The results were positively wonderFull!

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