When you want to get something done, is it better to just keep your head down and go a little underground, or is it better to make some noise and get all that attention and potential support? Danged if I know. One of my jobs is as an Artist In Residence, teaching fifth graders at one school about how to make clay tiles for an installation in their school. The other one is as Assistant Coordinator for a district-wide art program called Art Heritage. Art Heritage has been in existence for 33 years in the Grand Valley. We teach 150 or so volunteers (parents, grandparents, passionate community members) to bring art instruction units into 23 schools, to over 9000 elementary students. We train them and give them resources they can use to teach about the artist, their genre and their historical context, as well as to present an art project for the students to do, inspired by that artist. But often even parents whose kids have received the benefit of the Art Heritage Program, really have no clue what we do, especially if they have never volunteered for us. Then there are people who politely ask what exactly do you do again? It’s something like art? Do you teach kids? I work at saying it all in just a few words, so I don’t see their eyes dart away, already not really listening. It’s okay, I don’t really listen when my computer guy tells me what he did so my laptop will run again. It’s my job to make the projects and supplies accessible not only to the volunteers, but to the students they will teach. At times, it’s a little like that old game of “telephone.” I say something in the training class, our volunteers hear that and take it back to the classroom, where sometimes it comes out, well, a little wonky. So part of my job is to be very clear, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, when I present a project. Give them specific directions but give them leeway to use their own ideas. Spark an inspiration that will fire up in the classroom. Check out these Picasso faces–all different, all completely individual, and all totally valid answers to the challenge. Art Heritage’s original format was lengthy, very wordy, and used slides (you remember slides?) to show students the work of great artists. My predecessors worked out of their homes, storing supplies in a tiny closet and handing out mimeographed sheets to the volunteers. Over the years the program has developed into something quite a bit larger and more technologically adept. We now use Powerpoints and videos embedded in our website. We inhabit an office and about 250 square feet of warehouse space, plus our “Shed of Wonders” that houses a seemingly endless supply of paper (we are very good at scrounging donations from printshops.) I have been the Assistant Coordinator for eight years, and my supervisor has been the Coordinator for nearly 20. In that time, we have grown my job from simply putting the necessary supplies in boxes to send out to schools and speaking for a few minutes at Training about the art project, to a “real” job. At first I was a contract worker. Now I am paid a reasonable wage as a Paraprofessional, sometimes known as an Artist in Residence. Which sounds like I live in a warehouse, with boxes of oil pastels, colored pencils, markers and glue surrounding me. What I really do is spend a lot of time researching artists and resources to develop a project around those artists. Here’s my Audubon project, some credit to Pinterest, but mostly down to getting my hands painty and grubby, trying to think like a 7-year-old. Some days I feel like I’m being paid for something I love to do anyway, and other days, I know I’m seriously underpaid. The days with paint and paper and oil pastels, I think maybe I’m having too much fun. The days I move several hundred pounds of paper, markers, paint bottles and glue, I think I’m either underpaid or overage. We see about 150 volunteers, six times a year, for an all-morning training meeting in which we present all our labors of love, the units of study on significant and important artists. We present them with a fully-developed art project that honors that artist’s vision. Each volunteer needs to bring only a heart for putting more art in a child’s day, an understanding and passion for how important that is to each child’s development, and a willingness to try. We provide all the information, the support, the supplies, and the permission to experiment and think like a child again. One of my behind-the-scenes jobs is to procure, inventory, maintain and distribute all the supplies we need for those lessons. We train those volunteers, but they bring the lesson to about 9000 students. Six times a year. Do the math. Many, many reams of paper, lots of pints of paint, big class sets of oil pastels…it is a physical job, shifting all that into and out of each school’s supply box. We almost never see administrators in our corner of one of many school support buildings, where we plan and organize and brainstorm and bang out biographies and art projects around Dale Chihuly or Mary Cassatt. I see them even less than my supervisor does. She is half-time, I am barely 30 hours a month. I keep my head down most of the time, though. My job is not to shmooze with admin, but to figure out how much paint we’ll need for thousands of kids to paint birds like Audubon did. I like it that way. Sometimes I really want all our administrators to come to Training and see what we do. To watch these amazing volunteers talk about students who mob them in the hallway when they know the Art Heritage cart is coming to their room. I want them to hear about the kids
Teaching Children
Writing Activity: Bringing Animal Characters Alive Through Gesture
Taking as inspiration the world of puppeteers for the play “War Horse” this activity teaches students how to use gesture to make animal characters more realistic. This 23-minute TED Talk is about how the puppet horse in the play War Horse is made to feel alive. Animals are common characters in stories written by kids, horses especially. Different authors of stories about animals bring their characters to life in different ways, but one very common way to make an animal character believable as the animal it is declared to be is to have it display behaviors that are characteristic of that animal. In this video we see that the puppeteers who created the horse for War Horse enabled their huge puppet to display several very typical horse behaviors. First, all horses (all animals) breathe. So they gave their puppet the ability to look like it was breathing. Horses can breathe very loudly! When writing a story with a horse character, it can be helpful to remember that at some point the horse may breathe out through loose lips, making that distinctive horsey brrrrrrr sound. Second, anyone who has spent time around a horse knows its ears move in multiple directions and the horse may cup its ears towards a sound to listen, even before it moves its head. In fact, a horse may divide its attention between looking and listening. The puppeteers who created the wooden horse made sure it was able to move its ears in a horse-like way. In writing a story about a horse, the cocking of an ear, the letting out of a loud breath, the flicking of a tail, a pawing gesture of a front leg — these are the kinds of horse-like behaviors that can imbue a horse character with the sense of reality that strengthens the character in the story, making it more believable. Yes! It really is a stallion! The ideas for making puppets explained in this video can be applied to any animal — dogs, cats, parakeets, rabbits, chickens. A writing project based on the video could be as simple as writing a paragraph in which an animal character moves a short distance — a cat across a room, a horse to the edge of a paddock — but in the process uses one or two movements that are characteristic of that animal. The discussion inspired by the video could expand to include a discussion of gesture as a way to delineate human characters. The nervous laugh, the unconscious brushing back of the hair, a voice that goes up (or down) under stress — these are the gestures that help define each of our personalities. The characters in a story become more believable, more real, when given the occasional dimensionality of real life.
Writing Activity: adopting a style through unusual language, with “Once Upon a Time” by Robin Eldred, 6
Introduction to This Stone Soup Writing Activity “Once Upon a Time” is an example of a story written in unusual English. This work is by a six-year-old and is a good example of how young children express themselves differently from older children and adults. You will find lots of run-on sentences and dreamlike images flowing one into another. You will also see a lot of very short sentences, that are partly a sign that the author is very young, and partly a very effective method of story telling. You will see these techniques used by famous adult authors, as well as by some of the younger authors published in Stone Soup. It is also a useful practice for people working on poetry. Project: Adopting a Style For this project, create a narrator (the person who tells the story) who thinks in and speaks in an unusual English, in an unusual style. Think of a character—a infant, an older person, a visitor to your country whose first language is different, a person who is dreaming or confused for some reason, or someone living in an imaginary world of imaginary people and imaginary language. The fun of this project, and the challenge, is to find, invent and adopt the language of your character, use it to create your world and tell your story, and to make it understandable to your readers. So, imagine you aren’t you, whether you are a different age, or from a different time or place or planet, and that you think and speak an English different from your own in structure and wording. Who and what do you see? How do you describe it? And what is the story you have to tell? If it helps you to tell the story, illustrate it too. Once Upon a Time By Robin Elder, 6, Hopewell, New Jersey Illustrated by the author From the March/April 1986 issue of Stone Soup Once upon a time there was a little girl and a little boy. The little girl’s name was Judy. The little boy’s name was Michael. They lived in a old house. They played in the backyard. Their seesaw was made out of wood, their swingset was made out of wood, and their slide was made out of wood. They had a garden. The little boy went out to play and when he swung on the swings he saw a rainbow. It was just after a rainstorm when he went out to play. He went to his sister and his sister went outside. They both looked up at the sky. They saw the rainbow. They got their mother and father and then they were all standing outside looking at the rainbow. Then they heard a big boom. Their mother went into the kitchen, their father went into the bedroom, the little girl stayed outside, and the little boy went into the front yard. The mother found a broken window, the father found the faucet turned on, the little girl found the fence broken, and the little boy found an old man. The little boy went into the house and called the police. He said, “Somebody robbed our house.” And the police came and said, “Did you rob their house?” The old man said, “No, I am the plumber. I came to fix the sink. The fence got broken by the rain. The window got broken by the lightning. And they couldn’t turn off the sink, so I came just to fix the sink.” So the policeman said, “Where’s the rain and where’s the lightning? I need to arrest them.” But then the rain came and the lightning and everyone was safe and sound in the house but the policeman. He stayed outside and tried to catch the rain and lightning. When the rain and lightning stopped, there were two pretty rainbows and then it happened over and over. And then the little boy said, “Look at the rainbows.” Everybody looked. Everybody saw one rainbow for each of them. They all climbed their rainbows and slid down and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around until somebody stopped and then somebody else and somebody else and else and else and else and else. And there was a rainbow monster and a rainbow dragon and a rainbow bunny and a rainbow deer.
