Project Day Kickoff

With the start of the school year comes the start of another tradition: Project Day (the original impetus for this blog!). Since three of the five participants are officially "school-aged" we decided to make a change in the proceedings. Instead of coming up with a random, unstructured, uneducational project, we decided to turn Project Day into an official art class, and to bring in an actual, experienced, teacher: GRAMMIE!!
The time for class to begin arrived, and the students were ready - ready to see what amazing art supply they would get to use today. Grammie was ready. She pulled out........a bucket of crayons. Crayons? That wasn't exciting. What sort of crummy art class was this, anyway? Undeterred, Grammie began to demonstrate all the different ways you can use crayons (coloring very dark, thick and thin lines, shading, dots, blending and mixing, etc.)

Things were beginning to look up in this art class.

After practicing proper crayon technique for a while, the art lesson moved on to looking and drawing. Kids love to draw. Looking is a different story. It is a major concept, requiring careful demonstration, to teach kids that the eyes are NOT at the top of the oval-shaped head. They eventually got it.

Well, not all of them. The non-school-aged students had more fun decorating with stickers and making undirected scribbles (although I guess scribbling is an actual developmental stage).

The lesson ended with a section on Art Appreciation.

I think they liked it!