I hope everyone had as much fun at the Art Gallery as I did. I always find the program director, Carolyn, to be incredibly inspiring. Her and her team always come up with the neatest art projects to enhance the exhibits - I hope I can develop that creativity myself over time - to even have a quarter of her talent would be amazing!

Attached is a little video for my e-portfolio. I used the Art Show as my topic. Many thanks to Linda, Dawn, and Keith for agreeing to take on starring roles at the last minute! :)

Drumming in the T&L Building

Today I happened to be in the right place at the right time and was able to capture Nicola and Linda practicing for the Potluck performance today. I "helped" by humming along with the tune (I tried singing but couldn't remember any of the words to the song!) Hopefully I can track down Nicola over December and try out the drums myself - it looks fun and relaxing!!

I thought Linda and Nicola sounded awesome, but apparently the nearby offices didn't appreciate the "noise" and complained. Due to this, the concert was cut short. I guess some people just don't appreciate musical genius ;)

Sorry the video quality is not good - I compressed it to 12fps to make it stream quickly over blogspot.

Mixed-Media...

Post Secret is one of my favourite online displays of visual arts and I know it is much-loved by many people in the EY'07 cohort. From the website: "PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where peoplemail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard." People get pretty creative with them so they are definitely worth checking out. New secrets are posted every Sunday (or Saturday night, since we live on the west coast...) My favourite secret this week is posted below :) So true.

I hate singing, but...

To clarify that, I hate singing *in public*. I quite love singing to the radio in the car, or in the shower, or really anywhere where no one can hear me, but I do not enjoy singing in public because generally I sound like some kind of dying animal. It seems that I am completely tone-deaf and I find singing in public to be pretty humiliating. However - performing arts is part of this blog, so...
In Grade 7 I was lucky enough to be in an elementary school that had a class set of guitars, and I was even luckier to have a teacher who loved teaching guitar lessons. Guitar made up 90% of our fine arts curriculum that year and loved every minute of it. I kept taking lessons at Sight and Sound (until they closed their downtown location) and at one point could actually claim to be able to play guitar. Those days are long gone but I figured I couldn't have forgotten THAT much (right?) and took my guitar in to be tuned.
Turns out, actually, yes, you can forget THAT much over ten or twelve years. But I downloaded some music and found my book of guitar chords and managed to choke out one of my favourite songs - available here: http://www.chordie.com/chord.pere/www.xguitar.com/guitar-tabs/coldplay/parachutes/dont_panic.txt
Not brave enough to post a video, but pictures will follow later this week :)

I took the opportunity this week to integrate Art with our Assessment course. Okay nothing new there, we *all* integrated art since it is the premise of building the model Andrea required, but I was trying as much as possible to make it artsy, which made the project way more fun (something for me to remember when coming up with assignments to go with my lesson plans next semester.) My Assessment model was a City, with different streets leading to different aspects of "Assessment For and As Learning" strategies. I made a trip to the dollar store and bought different-textured scrapbook pages to use for the buildings and roads, sparkly stickers to use for vehicles, and coarse construction paper for the sky and land. I ended up being pretty happy with my "city" but also it was really great to take a little break and be crafty. I built my model at the end of a particularly long night of homework and it was really relaxing to cut out shapes and be creative for awhile! Going to try very hard to take some time over the weekend to do something artistic...

Frustration

Time is absolutely flying by, and as I am struggling to keep up with the workload I realize I've really neglected this blog for the most part. I've managed to fit in a few updates but I am missing on what is probably the most important aspect - our own creative explorations with art. For the last couple weeks I've promised myself I'd make time to at least do a few sketches in my sketchbook or experiment with the watercolour pencil crayons (that I bought in September with good intentions of using them often). It just seems so difficult to fit it all in. I think I'm going to have to self-impose a deadline and give my art the same priority I give regular assignments with deadlines...

Art Show Reflections...

I was extremely impressed with how well the Art Show turned out. Before going out on practicum, I definitely didn't have a clear picture in my mind of how everything would take place. Given that we put 90% of it together in a very short amount of time, I think everyone did an amazing job! I am really glad that Willow encouraged us to take on this project. Although it was a large task, it was certainly a worthwhile one.

I particularly enjoyed having an opportunity to invite the parents of a student who felt that their child was "struggling" with Grade 1. It was great to give that student a chance to shine in a non-conventional way. The parents were so proud of their child and mentioned that they would try to encourage their child's future participation in the arts. (Success!!)