Silverwood Park Residency with Seth Eberle – 4.25 Hours
This week I was at Silverwood Park on Thursday and Friday. On Thursday, I met with Seth to discuss the lesson that I will be leading this semester at the park. Each month Silverwood hosts a free program for families called Ned the Naturalist which I will be assisting with next month. The day includes a puppet show, art activity, and nature walk. The art activity engages with the work installed in Silverwood’s gallery. In March artist Margi Grill will be exhibiting work that portrays invasive plant species on wood. For the activity, participants will be able to color and screenprint on coaster sized wood panels. On Thursday, Seth and I made screens and began setting them up with illustrations of invasive plants that grow in the park.
On Friday Silverwood held a class for homeschool students between ages seven and fourteen. The group of students goes on a field trip every Friday and Silverwood hosts them three times a year. The students learned wood carving this week in conjunction with a lesson about plant identification.
Seth started by letting the students know that the classroom environment had to remain calm to keep everyone safe, he played quiet classical music from his phone to help create this setting. Seth then did a demonstration for creating a garden marker by carving a long twig. He talked about knife safety during this demo before handing out the knives and letting students select a twig. He used this activity as the practice and warm-up before demonstrating how to carve simple figures by rounding the top of a stubbier stick. The students were asked to make four figures. When they decorated the carvings by painting or gluing felt to them, the students were asked to keep one attribute the same across the four pieces so that they could be used as game pieces to play tic-tac-toe. During a nature walk students were asked to pick plants and tell a partner about it using three different statements; I notice, I wonder, and it reminds me of.