Jenny Kraft’s 5th grade classroom at Whittier International Elementary School - 4 hours
Jes Reyes and Spectrum ArtWorks, open studio hours - 3 hours
Tuesday and Friday at Whittier were split between helping the other student teacher complete his unit of learning on early American history. I continue to be near useless in this effort, So I was thankful to spend most of Friday with the Art Ambassadors for the first part of their portrait taking sessions. I was in charge of minding the students who rotated between coloring backdrops and taking photos of the students who came by. There were only about 5 Ambassadors and at most 4 students being photographed at any give time, so I was able to keep most of the students on task while Ms.Dominguez went down with a couple students to photograph some younger students. The students have varying levels of interest in photography, and all of them have a short attention span. 4th graders, despite being only slightly younger, represent a fairly large gap in terms of ability to focus. They don’t always realize when they’re not behaving, and respond well to gentle corrections. They had a great time taking photos, and took some pretty wonderful portraits! I’m excited to see them printed out. I think that seeing the portraits made physical will increase enthusiasm for the rest of the project.
Thursday was another quiet day at Spectrum. A couple artists I hadn’t met yet came by, and I was able to meet another volunteer who will be around during similar hours as Hanna and I. Jes was busy for most of the time I was there, so we mostly sat with the artists and chatted about art. Seeing them work, I wondered if anyone would be interested in a demonstration on how to use Adobe Illustrator. Many of the artists do objective based works, but all express an interest in at least dabbling in the abstract. Some of them do pattern work without the aid of digital art programs, but I still think it would be interesting to see their work made into a larger pattern that they could potentially print or use in other art pieces.