Creativity in the Holiday Kitchen

Here is one of my favourite holiday recipes to make with children. I hope your families and your students enjoy them over the years as much as mine have. The process of making these and admiring how they look is as much a part of Christmas as eating them! The rolling and twisting of the cookie dough "ropes" feel something like one of the construction techniques that we teach when we have children work with clay.

3/4 cup of softened butter or margarine
3/4 cup of sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla (Bev says if you use real vanilla it doesn't discolour the dough)
1/2 teaspoon of peppermint extract
2 cups of flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon of red food colouring
Cream butter and sugar. Beat in egg and vanilla. Mix flour with salt and baking powder and stir into creamed mixture. Divide dough in half and put peppermint extract and red food colouring (add until you have the desired pink colour) in one half, and the vanilla extract in the other (may use almond flavouring instead). Cover and chill dough in the fridge for 30 minutes or more. Divide each dough into balls about the size of a walnut or slightly larger. To make each cookie, roll a ball of uncolored dough into a rope and do the same with a ball of the pink dough. Then roll the two ropes together gently and twist them to get the candy cane stripe. Pinch the ends and place on a greased cookie sheet, curving the stick to form the cane. Sprinkle with red sugar. Bake at 375 degrees for about 10 minutes. Let cool a bit before removing from pan. Makes 30. (I usually double the recipe.)

Click the Link for My Course "Farewell"

I will be reviewing the blogs early next week and I will email your blog grade and final grade to your UNBC email address. It has been a great experience working with all of you and sharing your explorations in arts education. I look forward to seeing you in your own classrooms over the next few years. If you don't see me and would like to, I always appreciate invitations to visit schools and classrooms.

Finally, here's a LINK to someone who can say "farewell" better than I can! Have a great holiday and feel free to stop my office to say hello sometime.

Two Mandalas to Share

Mandala is Sanskrit for circle. In various traditions, mandalas have been used for spiritual purposes: to focus thoughts during meditation, to express understanding of the cosmos or universe, and even to express the artists' innermost self.These two mandalas by Natalie Parenteau have captured my imagination recently. The Eagle Mandala is an appropriate image for our last class because of the red centre, representing the "promise" stone that I gave to each of you as an artifact of the commitments to arts in education that we made to ourselves and to each other.

I bought the Raven Mandala print when I was in Whitehorse to add to my collection of raven images - I have a Bill Reid style raven sculpture and an Emily Carr raven print in my office. This new one I will hang beside my drafting table/drawing board at home, to inspire my own art. As I shared with you, the commitment I leave the class with is that I resolve to continue this blog throughout the year and use it to document my own explorations and development as an artist and arts educator. If I believe that we teach who we are just as much as what we know, then I want to add more of my own artmaking to my professional practice.

In one of your Research Platform assignments, someone had a quote about Northwest Coast art having a calligraphic quality. These mandalas do as well, and so I appreciate the graphic design of the images, particularly the lines and shaded colours, and I would like to try some similar images of my own. Making mandalas will combine my interest in calligraphy with a reverence for nature and also a wish to blend ethnic or cultural expression with personal meaning making in the visual art that is created. I also love working on smooth paper with coloured inks and chalks, which I think will be ideal media for this kind of image. So if you are interestd, stop back to this blog sometime to see images that I have created and to share comments about your own progress and discoveries. I will also post any new arts based lessons or units that I am working on and arts related resources - so let me know if you find something interesting!

Minstrels: Sing Your Way Home

We haven't found time to practice this in three lessons but some of you may want to learn it for a closing song. I have never found the notes or the guitar chords for it and I don't even remember where I learned it. However, its amazing what Google can find. Here is a midi version that is probably more musically correct than mine: try singing along until the tune is familiar to you. Also, there is a version on YouTube here but the words go by too fast unless you already know them. If anyone plays the guitar well enough by ear to share the chords with me, I would be delighted.

A Morning to Polish and Keep

Today's Read Aloud was this book by Julie Lawson. Check this link to read a review that may give you more ideas for lessons that connect to the story. I am now particularly interested in using this book as a cornerstone for an outdoor life and adventure theme. It was even more fun to share this book today because I had a wonderful fishing experience at Purden Lake on Sunday. Listening or "reading" a little deeper, what meaning did you find in the story to apply to Art or to Life?

"Ish" and the Optional Scribes and Minstrels Session

Minstrels: Today we reviewed the way to write and clap whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes. We listened to a song played on the recorder: Iroquois Lullaby, and we clapped its 4/4 time and talked about the Music element of "beat". The students also sang the song and clapped the time as I played the song on my recorder. The goal is that someday we will all play this song together. We reviewed how to hold the recorder and how the holes need to be fully covered with the fat parts of our fingers in order for the sound to be clear and not squeaky.

Scribes: We began drawing today with a sample exercise from Mona Brooks' book, Drawing with Children. I'm sharing the Amazon link with you, not because I want you to buy the book, but because you may want to scroll down and read some of the reviews. It is interesting to note that several adults who tried to use this book to teach their children to draw were amazed with the results for their own drawing. I also shared another excercise page of unidentifiable or "abstract" shapes that I developed with the drawing tools in the Word program. I can email this to everyone. I hope people will blog about the experience of using these exercises: there may be some frustration but also some surprises. How might you extend this exercise? Next, we did an exercise that I call "Mystery Drawing". Students fold a blank sheet of paper in four and the teacher puts two intersecting lines on the white board or chalkboard. Students then follow each mark that the teacher puts on the board, using the lines or the fold lines to guide them in the placement of the line on the page. Check out blogs to see what people experienced in this exercise, remembering that they didn't know that it would be a caricature or cartoon of a grumpy old man until the last few lines were in place. There were no "Show and Share" contributions yet today so I read aloud "Ish". Although we spent most of the half hour observing carefully, "ish" helps to teach that drawings need not be precise replicas of what we see. You might like to comment on the tension in that - How can we teach students to be observant and increase their technical skills in drawing and still have them value spontaneous, flowing lines and shapes that are "vase -ish" renditions of a vase, or "tree-ish" depictions of a tree?

Yes, REAL Men DO Blog!

Here's the evidence. This was posted on a blog by Mr. T., the local king of bloggers and master of blogging professional development for District 57 teachers. I await the URLs from our own masters of the blogging universe. As always, the key question is: How does something like this connect to Arts PLOs? Anyone want to make a case for morphing and other visual play as legitimate curriculum?