fieldwork day 9

weight: 216 - no surprises, didn't gain that's good.
treadmill - not today - early seminary again
significant chore: I need to get the bulletin announcments ready for the March bulletin. Tonight is her deadline.
Exploraton opportunities: I'm still a little sluggish here. I need to keep my eyes open.

Field report: We painted in class today. We are studying the works of children's author Eric Carle. He has an interesting way of doing his illustrations by using collage. He creates sheets of painted paper that he uses for cutting out for his collages. In his studio he will spend a day or so painting up these papers, creatively adding swirls, scratches, splots and such. He then files these in drawers by color (Reds, blues, greens, etc....). Then when he wants to create a lady bug or spider, or such, he'll get the color papers he needs and cut and pastes away. (It's a little more complicated than cut and paste - you need to see the video).
We are going to do a bulletin board representing his work, so today we painted sheets of paper to give us the color pieces we need for next week's collage project.
The activity reminded me a little of that art work I had seen at the hospital, so it was fun to begin to play with it.
As we were cleaning up, one of the girls (my class artist) noticed that the colors on the clean up cloth looked quite artistic. So she decided to save the wipey and during free time mounted it on a background paper to make a new piece of artwork. Others copied her with their wipe up cloths. One boy, who wasn't part of the clean up crew, got a clean wipey to color. I as fascinated to see the children make art out of essentially trash like this. Improvised art. This is what it is to be creative, to see the art all around us. To open our minds to the possibilities. Today I got a reminder lesson on seeing art.