Friday, December 28, 2012

If I Ran for President Poster


Two days before the Presidential election, I decided to have the students think about issues that were important to them and how they would like to serve and help their country if they were running for President of the USA. It was moving to see how thoughtful their posters were and included several recurring themes such as food stamps, finding jobs, immigration, and housing the homeless.


























Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse and more!

Recently, my middle schoolers worked on a few different projects studying the artists Wasily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. We also learned about positive and negative space creating leaf inspired subtractive collages.









We resued the leftover scraps from our positive/negative space leaf collages to create Henri Matisse inspired collages.












Monday, December 10, 2012

Winter Wish Tree

My favorite projects to teach are interactive ones, particularly Yoko Ono inspired Wish Trees. It never ceases to amaze me how personal, moving, silly, thoughtful, compassionate, and heartbreaking the wishes end up being. A reminder that so many people, youth especially, are crying out to have their voice heard in a world that typically tells them there is only one right answer for something and rarely asks them what they care or dream about.

You can create a Wish Tree of your own at home, at church, at your mosque, ashram, synagogue, meditation center, backyard, neighborhood, in the park, school, friend's house-anywhere there are trees! Can't find a tree? Paint your own on a big piece of paper and use sticky-notes.

For more information about Yoko Ono's Wish Tree project, please visit website below. She has collected over a million wishes and they are being buried in time capsules at the base of the John Lennon Imagine Peace Tower.

You can also tweet wishes or send facebook wishes!

mail all the wishes to IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, PO Box 1009, 121 Reykjavik, Iceland.

http://imaginepeacetower.com/yoko-onos-wish-trees