Bones in Black and White

As we approach Halloween, the children are fixated on all things “spooky.” In order to indulge the spirit of Halloween in the art room and bridge it to our prior work on drawing self-portraits and our bodies, we created skeletons. The children used white paint, homemade relief-stamps of skulls, and up-cycled sticker tape on black construction paper to assemble “bones” into a skeleton. We talked about how skeletons are meant to be spooky at Halloween for fun, but really, it is what we all look like underneath our layers of skin and flesh and that that isn’t really scary at all. One child cleverly asked for a marker so he could draw bones inside his skeleton’s bones to show what it had eaten!

We also continued our exploration of black and white with chalk on slate. The children love the bold contrast as well as drawing then erasing and drawing again. They were able to draw bones, skulls, and even cars then show them to one another, talk about them and then start over very simply. This is very satisfying when our patience or focus is thin on a Monday morning!

As Halloween draws ever closer, our work with bodies, bones and more will continue….how exciting the ordinary can be this time of year.

–Miss Lori, Atelierista

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The Golden City

For weeks, the four and five year olds have reveled in creating a 3-D “construction site” made  by glueing many random loose parts on an old chipboard we had lying around in the atelier. The board was secured to a small table, just big enough for two children at a time to sit at and work on the site. A small provocation table sat next to it with a book on castles of Scotland, a basket of found bits such as shells, feathers, marker lids, bag ties, acorns, essentially anything found or normally discarded, and lots of glue. Each duet could work on the site with the only rule being that they couldn’t un-do someone else’s work.

Once we felt we had come to a point of completion, the site was spray painted with gold. The children immediately exclaimed, “A golden city!!!”  We have learned what beauty lies in the collection of small things, carefully assembled and showered with attention. The whole is indeed greater than just the sum of it’s parts.

Miss Lori, Atelierista