Orange Band: Human, Week 8

This week was all about declarations, and wow was it great to build on the foundation of our work during the Seed Arc. This time around, each kiddo wrote their own declaration, using a form that we designed together and will meet with a member of the administration to get their project plan approved--yay!We hit the ground running (as per usual) Monday morning with declaration form design. We remembered the things we needed to include in our project plans: the What, the How and the Why. What do we want to make/experiment with/research? What tools, materials and resources will we use? How will we complete this project, what is our plan? And, why do we want to do this project? How does it connect to what we learned during exploration?With some building blocks in the back of my mind, I prompted kiddos to describe to me what a declaration should include and look like, and the order they thought the information should be presented in the form. And this is what we came up with!I find that taking the time to create resources like this with learners pays off exponentially in the future. During the Seed Arc, we established together everything that should be included in a declaration. So, when we got around to writing our Human Arc declarations, so many kiddos remembered exactly what we needed in a declaration writing form. We were able to have this design session using an established vocabulary that everyone could understand.I was worried that thinking ahead to make a goal for their project work each week would be a bit too challenging; kids this age are deeply rooted in the present, it is very hard for them to plan. We framed the weeks this way: Week 1 is 'Write declarations' for everyone, and Week 5 is 'Get ready to present for everyone.' What will you need to do in the 3 weeks in the middle? Then, I decided to take it one step further: for the remaining Monday mornings of the Human Arc, everyone will make themselves a checklist of what they need to get done during that week--just like Elsa, Be Thorough! We talked about how our declaration represents the big picture of our larger goal and project. And, in order to complete our projects, we'll need to break them down into accomplishable tasks. We filled out our Week 1 checklist together, because, again, everyone's would be almost the same: Write declaration, meet with an administrator, revise and get approved, and RESEARCH.Huge shoutout to Sadie's mom, MB for the workshop she came in and led Friday morning! We talked earlier this arc about doing some figure drawing  with the Orange Band, and we finally worked it into our schedule.  MB is a talented artist, and has a great understanding of both art history and how to present these topics to young kids. She started out with a quick rundown of some of the different ways the human form has been represented throughout history, from the simple, to more detailed and realistic, to impressionist and expressionist and abstract. It was really important to me to show many different ways that humans have drawn and painted to humans. Then, we used different types of charcoal to draw at different speeds. Using a harder charcoal pencil, we drew one of our bandmates who held a pose for several moments. After that, we used a softer charcoal to quickly draw another bandmate who changed her pose about every 30 seconds. Wham bam thank you ma'am! MB did an awesome job of emphasizing that these drawings were not meant to be perfect. Our job was to think about the shapes we saw, the movement of the model's body, and putting charcoal to paper.And, what are our expression projects you might ask? We're making a human body together, of course! We'll be filling up one of our tape sculpture bodies with body parts! Ask your kiddo which body part they plan to contribute!