Arts Explorer # 10 Community Arts Project

The organization our chose to support was The Canadian Hearing Society.  We chose to support this organization because as Early Childhood Educators, we have been involved in the lives of many hearing impaired children and collectively felt that spreading the awareness of hearing impairment was an issue we wanted to address.

The Canadian Hearing Society's mission is to remove barriers to communication.  We decided to address issue by creating a carton video with mostly music and some test.

The premise of our video revolves around animals communicating to one another nonverbally to warn each other of danger that is coming.  In showcasing this idea, we want to send out the message that there should be no barriers to communication (nothing stopping people from communicating) therefore helping an organization like The Canadian Hearing Society which provides services those who are hearing impaired can help all people communicate better with one another.

We chose to create a video to promote this awareness because our world has become completely technologically advanced and the internet has become pretty much a necessity.  By shooting a video, one can only hope that it would go viral and could be shared through networking websites.  This would also allow for the video to be seen worldwide and out message to be spread all over the world.

In order actually create our video, we would need a video camera to shoot the video, once all drawings for the cartoons are completed.  Paper, pencils and markers would be needed to draw the cartoons and color them in.  Music would be needed for added effect and a video editing program would be needed to edit the video so that timing is correct between scenes.

Our video concept would consist of eight scenes for promoting this mission:

Scene 1

Fish are happily swimming about under the sea.  They swim naturally in line. They use their body movement to communicate with others.

Scene 2

            Suddenly, screen shakes and fishes scatter.  It seems they sense something will be happened.  They begin to warn each other.

Scene 3

            One fish jumps out of water very smartly and lands right outside ant hole that hear the shore.

Scene 4

            At that moment, the last ant who is close to the shore and get the message from the fish.  Then the ant uses his antennae for passing the message that he gets it from the fish.

Scene 5

            In the middle of the art line, the rabbit gets the ant message.   Right the way, the rabbit tells the other rabbit about the danger will be coming.

Scene 6

            Few minutes later, “danger will be coming” this message spread to the whole forest.
Scene 7

            Silence, no music background.
Screen shows first message:  

Scene 8

            Screen shows the second message:

                                      The message is from The Canadian Hearing Society


We have created a take away for the audience, with our little slogan.

I believe this idea will be popular in all the ECE center because it can also be transformed in to real life as people can act out the roles of animals to form a larger production.

For reviewing our presentation, I suggest the stakehoulders part should be presented by the PowerPoint.  Also, making a video is more attractive than role play.

Arts Explorer # 8 Pretend Play & Magical Thinking

What is Pretend Play?

According to Shipley D.(2008), Segal (2002), uses the work of McCune (1986) to describe five levels of pretend play between ten months and two years.  At level 3, children are engaged in decentred pretend when the child engages either alone or with another child in an activity that is usually performed by someone else, for example, feeding the doll in a high chair or rocking a teddy bear.  Level 4 pretend play involves enacting two or more different schemes in a realistic sequence as in undressing the doll, putting the doll in the bath water, drying, and then dressing the doll.  Level 5 shows more planning on the child's part as he relates what he intends to do and then reenacts a familiar event such as packing up the cart with the packsacks, food, and blankets to go on a camping trip, symbolically playing out an event that he has witnessed at home. 

Make Their Own Restaurant

• Mixing and stirring in the kitchen to prepare a meal for the child's restaurant.
  

  Use the kitchen for this game. Have the child draw menus and place mats for use at the pretend restaurant. Pull out safe kitchen utensils such as plastic mixing bowls and plastic whisks for your child to use. The child will take your order on a pad of paper. Use play dough or cut-out magazine pictures for the pretend food. Your child will prepare the meal with the utensils, then serve it in an apron. A cash register can also be used with pretend money for paying the bill.

Read more: Pretend Games for Kids | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/list_6741306_pretend-games-
kids.html#ixzz1HCVgUKkK

Seeing dentist is nervous, pretend play letting child develop their language ability and cope with some psychologist issue.

What does it mean by Magical Thinking?

According to Wikipadia, the free encyclopedia,  Magical thinking is causal reasoning that looks for correlation between acts or utterances and certain events. In religion, folk religion and superstition, the correlation posited is between religious ritual, such as prayer, sacrifice or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking is a condition that causes the patient to experience irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because they assume a correlation with their acts and threatening calamities.

Magical thinking includes all systems of magic, as it includes the idea of mental causation, i.e. the possibility of the mind having an effect on the physical world directly. In Jungian psychology, magical thinking is described in terms of synchronicity, an approach that looks not for causality but for meaning in the co-occurrence of certain events.

"Quasi-magical thinking" describes "cases in which people act as if they erroneously believe that their action influences the outcome, even though they do not really hold that belief"

How a wonderful picture!  It is a real man and a real sun.  After these two main elements mix together, it comes out not a real scene.  Use our imagination and observation in our daily life, there are many surprises products.

References

Shipley D. (2008), Empowering Children Play-Based Curriculum for Lifelong Learing, 4th Edition, Nelson Education Ltd. 

Arts Explorer # 7 Grocery Shopping with a Twist!

Every time, I go to Chinese grocery store.  There's ample parking space and spacious aisles to allow multiple pushcarts to go through bidirectionally. The selections are plentiful from Korean, to Japanese, to Filipino, to Chinese and more. Precooked meals are also available on the right side of the store immediately upon entering along with available food court-inspired seating.  There are so many choices no matter what style you want to eat!  For instance, the Asian's daily food, rice, comes from North America, Tailand, China, Taiwan and etc.  There are more than ten lands of origin.  

The above picture is the dry food conner.  The left side of the picture is the canned food.  All of the canned food products come from Asia and the right side is the noodle soup.  There are more than ten kinds.   

Art word of the week

Shapes or Volume

This is a science concept.  Most of the people think about the shape before volume when they measure the food or drink.  Is that correct?  Do an experiment by yourself, then you will find the answer.

Canned Food is not as healthy as the fresh food, but  still has the attraction.

They can be:

Mice Pork    

Mice Beef

Fruits

Drink

Soup

Rice

Congee

Noddle

Vegetable

Sea Food

Oil

Seasoning

Powder

Here is the sketch:

Peach is one kind of fruit.  I like the taste of this fruit in a can rather than fresh.  It is easy to eat.

Canned soup is a simple and fast canned food.  I love it!

 Tuna fish can be cooked for a sandwich or snack.

Arts Explorer # 9 Guerilla Art

For my guerilla art project, I chose to use sidewalk chalk. First, a sidewalk is something everyone must use - who walks on the road, anyway? And chalk reminded me of a classroom; the outdoors and the indoors were tied together in this medium. The chalk is so simple to use, yet the colours are so vibrant and stand out very much. Impossible to miss on any surface. 

It was a sunny afternoon outside, and I bent down on my hands and knees to get started.

First, I chose a place on the sidewalk that was surrounded on sides left and right with grass; that way, pedestrians would have to step aside in order to cross.

Then, I proceeded to draw a gorilla - true guerilla art. 

My message to the world was, "STOP PLEASE". I wanted to see how people would react to such a command. "Stop", like the Stop signs one sees every day, and "please", a softer side to the command.

Then, I hid behind my car and behind a tree to see what people's reactions were like.

This is an old man and his young friend. They did not step on my drawing, but walked off to the side, constantly staring at my work.

This is a Chinese man who just stepped on my drawing. He stopped afterwards, though. He seemed very surprised to see a message on the ground.

I feel that art, albeit sidewalk chalk, has an effect on people of all ages and ethnicities. Something as simple as an arbitrary person's doodles on a surface are seen by everyone that walk by. I realized that art is a form of self expression and a means of identifying oneself. It feels as if I communicated with these strangers, without saying anything or without knowing who they were. I am proud of my work and would like to experiment further with guerrila art; on different surfaces and places, using different media.

Arts Explorer #6 Illustrating With Scissors

SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 2011

Arts Explorer #6 Illustrating With Scissors

Illustrating with Scissors


What do you think about these two pictures depicted in the carpets? At the top of the carpet, it shows the farm with a farm house, mill, warehouse, sky and birds. This is exactly like a photo. However, this photo is not recorded on an SD card or on film - it is exposed using a much more painstaking approach. The makers of the two carpets cut thread to length and sewed each one into a frame to make a carpet. Although one thread is a small part of this one carpet, if it were missing there would be a hole laid bare to see.

This carpet, just like a photo, captures a scene of life from a moment in time. Of course there is a story, but this is only the illustration.

ACTIVITIY

You will need:

1) Fabric Paint
2) Plastic (or cardboard) sheet
3) Box cutter or exacto knife
4) Carpet rectangle
5) Sponge or paint brush
6) Spray Fixative (optional)

Step 1:

A great way to save on a carpet piece for your mat is to go to a carpet sales place and ask them if they have any discontinued samples. Some places will give them to you for free and some will charge $1 or $2 each.

Step 2:

Decide on a design. You can keep it simple or as extravagant as you can cut for the stencil. Draw out the design on a piece of paper first to make sure it is what you want it to look like.

Step 3:

Transfer the design onto the plastic sheet or cardboard sheet.

Step 4:

Cut the image out with an exacto knife or box cutter.

Step 5:

Line up the stencil you made onto the carpet piece where you would like your design to show. Tape down the stencil.

Step 6:

Cover the other areas of the carpet not to be painted with newspaper so you don't accidentally paint in the wrong spot.

Step 7:

Take your fabric paint and sponge paint it onto the carpet piece. Try to stay in a straight up and down motion, so the paint does not go under the stencil.

Step 8:

Allow to dry for a couple hours, then remove the tape and stencil. As Schirmacher & Fox (2009) found, "In kindergarten through grade four, young children should experiment enthusiastically with art materials and investigate the ideas presented to them through visual arts instruction. They exhibit a sense of joy and excitement as they make and share their artwork with others" (p.195).

Arts Explorer #5 Watch an 'art film' and chat about it

Michel Gondry's 'Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind'

Joel (Jim Carrey) is stunned to discover that his girl friend.  Clementine (Kate Winslat) has had their tumultuous relationship erased from her mind.  Out desperation, he contacts the inventor of the process,  Dr. Howard Mizrzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) to get the same treatment.  But as the memories of Clementine begin to fade, Joel suddenly realizes how much he still loves her.  

The Wall Street Journal calls "a romantic comedy unlike any other!"

Me:  this movie is similar as the other one "Inception".  I should say "Inception" is similar to it.  Because both of them talk about the brain system. 

Patsy: Yeah, but I find this is much simpler in the way that it simple delves in memories rather than formulating a dream. In Inception, they make it so complicated that it ends up being so hard to follow. In this one, we just look at his memories. It’s all on two levels – real life, and Joel’s mind.

Me: you know, this movie is difficult to be understand.  I do not know the main theme until end of the movie, both of them say they are not perfect but they do not mind and want to get together again. 

Patsy: I guess it’s just a life thing. I find the ending rather pathetic, but maybe that’s just the fact that I’m a romance girl and I’m used to more sappy endings. This one’s more like “ah well, that’s that”. The movie was really confusing in the way that he kept flashing through his memories. There didn't even seem to be a time line.

Me: I know! I was so confused half the time…

Patsy: Kate Winslet is a really good actress. She handles the American accent perfectly.

Me: Yeah, I saw her in “Titanic” too. Actually, that’s the first time I saw her. She plays the two different characters well.

Patsy: Still, she looks funny with blue hair.

Me:  I don't thing this movie is romantic comedy.  I think the producer used the imagination with the knowledge of the brain development to development the theme.

Patsy: Definitely not romantic comedy. About the brain development knowledge, I don’t really remember if they ever explained how they actually deleted certain sequences of your memory.

Me: Finally, they have happy ending – as the bible commends, nobody is perfect so we have to forgive each other and love each other.

Patsy: Staple of life!

Me:  you know, at the beginning of the movie, the main character, Joel, said he wondered why he fell in love with every woman had seen.  At that time, I judged him based on if he was smart or handsome or not.

Patsy: There’s gotta be a reason why he would be so attracted to women –they had to be attracted to him too, right? Actually, the people in this movie are very on the normal-looking side. I mean, the main characters are both good looking, but the director seemed to want to downplay this so they would seem like more normal people.

Me: Joel said he talked to the stranger because he was nice.  I do not agree with him.  I guessed he wanted to talk to her as well.  He just made up an excuse.

Patsy: Of course! Like he said, he had lots of humiliation. Everyone has something they have to hide


Me: In ECE, dramatic play can stimulate the children's language development and emotional control.  According to Schirrmacher & Fox (2009) stated, "In children's play should be nondirective.......their own playfulness without overwhelming children or performing for them"(p.40).

Reference

Schirrmacher, R., & Fox, J.E. (2009).  Art and creative development for young children (6the Ed.).  Belmont, CA: Delmar.

Arts Explorer #4 Looking for Patterns in Urban Settings & Nature

What is a pattern?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, a pattern, from the French patron, is a type of theme of recurring events or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set of objects.

These elements repeat in a predictable manner. It can be a template or model which can be used to generate things or parts of a thing, especially if the things that are created have enough in common for the underlying pattern to be inferred, in which case the things are said to exhibit the unique pattern.

At the beginning of this project, I never paid attention to anything around me in regards to patterns.  Since I started, I found thousands pattern around me and they are easily discovered.

Below are pictures of patterns I found in my neighborhood.  Along the sidewalk, the city plants many trees, probably planted in the same year and season.  Growing under a similar environment, they present a nice pattern.

Real Pattern !!

I visited a coffee shop; I step in.  Do you notice under your feet, the carpet, another pattern?

Do you know where you can find it?  It's just beside our campus!!

In ECE program, curriculum as subject matter, content, or academic area.  The children may enjoy making patterns for their friends to copy.  This is one of the sensory development .

Arts Explorer #3: Fine Art Critique

Paul Peel, After the Bath

Paul Peel

born London, Canada West (now Ontario), 1860; died Paris, France, 1892
After the Bath
1890
oil on canvas
147.3 x 110.5 cm
Gift of the Government of the Province of Ontario, 1972

This painting attracted me because it was one of the larges that I had ever seen hanging on a wall. I love a giant product, especially with oil paintings as it seems that the scene is happening right in front of you, the distance between the picture and the receiver smaller than before. With the large size, the details are easily displayed. Peel’s painting is very realistic and shows the objects in three dimensions, which is not easy to depict. I also was transferred into the picture, feeling the warmth the children felt from the fire in contrast to the cold weather of winter.

            The warmth is relayed through the contrast of colours. The fire casts a orange-yellow glow on the children’s fronts, whilst their backs are a cold blue-grey. Watching from afar, one feels cold because they are not near the fire, but if I allow myself to step into the picture I feel much warmer.

            The astounding detail that Peel presents in the oil painting adds to its realism. He takes great care in painting out the crease in the thigh of the girl sitting down and the line of her backbone as well as the tendrils of hair that wisp outwards, as if embracing the fire. He manages to capture the chubbiness the hands and the skin tone of each child. However, there is contrast in this as well as the rest of the painting is not in such detail as the two children, causing the focus to be solely on them and the glow of the fire on their bodies.

            At the beginning, I thought the title of the painting would be “Warmth”. After, I read that it was titled “After the Bath”, and I smiled in m y mind. The painting depicted the aftermath of an event, but not the event. The artist seems to want the receiver to use their own imagination for the scene and then he tells us his purpose. Similarly, the fire in the painting is not directly viewed; we see only the effects of the warmth of the fire – the glow on the children’s skin and the reflection of it on the floor. Although the fire is not visible, the viewer’s eyes are drawn towards it because the subjects of the painting are facing it and presumably observing it as well. Hence, there are three levels presented to the viewer: one, as a viewer, two, as a viewer in the painting, and three, as one of the children. In this way, Peel’s painting allows the receiver to use a wide scope of imagination as to what the fire looks like.

            Peel was known for his depictions of children and also nude humans, being one of the first Canadian painters to explore nudes as a subject.

The Canadian Art History online archive reports that Paul had two small children, a boy and a girl that often  posed nude for him and he used them as subjects for several of his art works.

Paul Peel (7 November 1860 – 3 October 1892) was a Canadian academic painter. Having won a medal at the 1890 Paris Salon, he became one of the first Canadian artists to receive international recognition in his lifetime.

Peel was born in London, Ontario, and received his art training from his father from a young age. Later he studied under William Lees Judson and at thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts underThomas Eakins. He later moved to Paris, Francewhere he received art instruction at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme and at theAcadémie Julian under Benjamin Constant, Henri Doucet and Jules Lefebvre.

In 1882 he married Isaure Verdier and had two children with her: a son (Robert Andre, in 1886) and a daughter (Emilie Marguerite, in 1888).

Peel travelled widely in Canada and in Europe, exhibiting as a member of the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy. He also exhibited at international shows like the Paris Salon, where he won a bronze medal in 1890 for his painting After the Bath. He was known for his often sentimental nudes and for his pictures of children; he was among the first Canadian painters to explore the nude as a subject.

He contracted a lung infection and died in his sleep, in Paris, France, at the age of 32.

(information on Paul Peel courtesy of Wikipedia)

Fine Art's concept can be developed in the program of ECE.  The educator provides enough materials and environment are very important.

Arts Explorer #2: Instant Sculpture

Instant Sculpture is a particular point in time's product.  Different direction has different image.  Here are the four dimensions, each offering a different view on the sculpture. As each person views art differently, so can I with the help of looking at this sculpture at four different angles. The sculpture is quite simple: stack up pennies and place them on various surfaces. Use your eyes and creativity; add a spice of imagination... and voila!

According to Schirrmacher & Fox (2009) stated, "ECE children can sculpt with clay; this is vital to early childhood. Both art and movement involve nonverbal expression"(p.270).  

The reason behind the sculpture:

I used the penny because its worth is close to none - production of the penny is almost abolished by the Canadian government. After taking the abundant pennies from my purse and mindlessly playing around with them, I realized that they do have worth - as art. The penny is irreplaceable yet so easily dispensable.

Here's a work in progress... enjoy!

Reference

Schirrmacher, R., & Fox, J.E. (2009).  Art and creative development for young children (6th Ed.).  Belmont, CA: Delmar.

Arts Explorer #1: My Creative Inspiration

Finding Inspiration

This video gives me great joy because it makes me realize that all of life - any time, any place - is inspiration. Inspiration is simply an idea that floats free and enters a mind at a certain time.

Imagine What Creativity Would Look Like. But Don't Tell Me, Because I See It Differently...

The Irony of Creativity

There is no definition for creativity.

Just like the word, there are no limits to its definition. Nor are there suitable words to describe it.

There are no boundaries. 

There are no rules.

There is no frame, 

no packaging, 

no strings, 

no set time period, 

no set place, 

no set feeling 

or mental state. 

The irony, of course, is, I've just created a definition.

What is the relationship between creativity and a child's development in ECE ?    Creative children should be viewed as national as sets.  As Schirrmacher & Fox, 2009, stated , " the ECE educator needs creative individuals who will not settle for givens, but instead strive to fulfill themselves while making the world a better place live for all people" (p.20).

Reference

Schirrmacher, R., & FOx, J.E. (2009), Art and creative development for young children (6the Ed.). Belmont, CA: Delmar.