Creative family opportunities

Artist Julie Balzer from Balzer Designs, recently posted a video about art journaling (see below) on her website. On nights when we can't do messy art, I find art journaling with my 2 kids much more manageable and still very enjoyable. The key is to get every child a spiral bind art journal of their own so you can all work side by side and to have all your materials at your fingertips. You too will need an art journal of course. We do everything from cutting and gluing, doodling, drawing, coloring with crayons and markers, use stickers, stamps, punchers.....the sky's the limit.

So, I encourage Murch families to try family art journaling. I assure the grown ups will even love it. Enjoy!!

Art Journaling Fast Forward from Julie Balzer on Vimeo.

Note: for kids younger than 1st grade, I might just try giving them a paper to work on instead of a journal for they will not want to 'work' on a page for long.

Storytelling Class Update

For the afternoon storytelling class (Fridays for 20 K and 1st graders) we have been creating props for the story Three Little Pigs. Children practiced various emotions that each character felt at different parts of the story while sitting in a circle. Some kids made teeth for the wolf using rolled tape, some kids rolled paper for the 'hair' and glued them on. This coming Friday kids will take turns playing each part and being the audience.

Note: I will also be ordering some finger puppets and table puppet theaters for future classes.

Whole-School Auction Project Picture

Finally.....here is the image of the whole-school auction project Regina Holliday and I worked on for this year. My contribution was making sure every single child in the school added a 'twig' to the 3d tree you see on the left. In my own work I create trees and roots using molded paper on canvas, so this was such an amazing experience for me to share my own personal style with each child. Regina's contribution to this piece was working with the children to make the amazing moths you see and the very dramatic night painting. I just love that moon......

Storytelling using drawings

Children in prek have been learning about using drawing to tell stories. I demonstrated a story through pictures on my Elmo projector, the kids then chose a familiar story to illustrate to illustrate. Each work was just as rich and full of detail as the one you see below. Can you guess who is the troll in this image?

Tessellations Introduction (5th)

5th graders have been creating tessellations in art after looking at M.C. Escher's work. Below are some samples. We will explore more complicated designs using other geometric shapes after this week.

below is a video, so you and your entire family could play around with tessellations at home....

(warning, there is a very annoying ad right before this video.....ignore)

3D trees

As part of a unit on trees that will extend to learning about trees in the Murch property, 3rd graders here are making 3d trees. In the coming weeks they will paint their tree, each choose a Murch tree and create leaf prints for their trees. These trees will also be used as part of the set for the Murch play Little Red Riding Hood (3-5). Please see the Murch site for audition times and dates next week.

Kindergarten Castle Prints (Welsh)

Children in Kindergarten are creating castles. We began by creating castles using paper and combining simple shapes to create castles. We spoke about what are some castle characteristics and listed each item visually. Children then drew their castle on scratch foam to create their stamp or 'printing plate'. From their stamps they created various 'prints'. One sample of the prints from each child is below.....