Orange Band: Human, Week 6

And we're back--almost all of us at least!This week's highlights were a workshop with Claire Rabkin, a guest artist-educator from Southern Exposure, a group mural project, and brainstorming project ideas.A few weeks ago, Amanda Simons let me know that an artist with SoEx is leading workshops with mostly middle-school-aged kids based on the work of the artist Robby Herbst. Herbst's work has to do with rules and systems, and uses kids' understanding of games as an entry point to encourage them to notice the rules and systems that govern the world around us. She and I met with Claire, and put our workshop on the calendar.Claire modified her workshop to work with the Orange Banders' developmental level and it was so great! First, we thought about Rules and Play, and made drawings describing what these two ideas mean to us. After drawing, we noticed lots of words on the Rules side, and lots of playgrounds on the Play side--even though the Rules side drawings often described games!Then, Claire led the kiddos through a game developed by Herbst called Grabster. Grabster is a lot like Twister, but each colored circle has a word on it describing a type of resource we think everyone should have access to (education, , , ) and the circles are loose, not connected together on one mat. So, when you're playing, you can grab, steal and hoard the dots in order to have them available when that color is spun. This play is intended to give kids' an emerging understanding of what it's like when resources are hoarded and not accessible to all, when the rules we think we all play by are broken by a few.Finally, we brainstormed a system from our daily life and the rules that govern this system: our food system, what to do when someone gets sick, morning routines, just to name a few. The kiddos decided to play a game based on getting sick--it was hilarious!In a few weeks, Claire will assemble all of the student work from workshops she's led around the Bay Area and exhibit them at Southern Exposure. Details to come!For spring break last week, I went to New York to visit friends and family. While I was there, I got a really cool book on leading art workshops with children by the artist Herve Tullet. I really like the structure of these workshops because the emphasize artistic elements like color, shape and line over technique and figure. What's more, kiddos mostly create together, whether working on one large mural, or each contributing to smaller pieces in musical chairs style movement. On Friday, we worked together on a mural called 'Field of Flowers.' To create an abstract, full mural with depth of field, we just drew circles and dots, and we used oil pastels for their rich and solid colors. We moved around a lot, and took breaks to stand up and look at our work to see where we needed to add shapes and colors. We added on to others circles and dots, and waited until the very end to add stems. On the DL, another student MIGHT decide to use our mural as the background for a mural project she's been working on!Oh, and we brainstormed all of these project ideas! We can't wait to hear Emilio and Tesla's ideas when they get back too though.