La Vereda Clase de Arte #3

Hola! Look at our fantastic puppets!

This week I thought it would be fun for the children to make puppets.  A number of students had been representing faces and/or figures in their previous collages and I thought making puppets would be a great way to encourage more of that exploration, as well as provide the opportunity for the kids to “dig in” to some really exciting materials like scraps of fabric, beads, shiny paper, string, etc.  We got sooo lucky because the night before the class I was thinking I’d just cut up some of Renzo’s (and my) old clothes, but Taty ended up having a super duper stash (2 barrels full!) of fantastic fabric!  Thanks to Taty, we scored the perfect fabric scraps for the project…bright colors, interesting textures, vivid patterns, opaque & translucent.  We did end up cutting up one of Renzo’s t-shirts as well which inspired an impressive puppet outfit fashioned by one of the older boys in the group!  It was so fun to see the children so engaged in their work; the personal nature of creating their own figure/character was really powerful and I hope to continue drawing on that.

There’s more I want to say but there’s been so much going otherwise that I need to write up another post or two tonight on other topics to catch you all up before we leave for Puerto Plata in the morning…and I’m worried I won’t have enough time because it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to upload all the amazing photos I want to share with you.  The internet is not quite the same here, lol.  Anyway, yes we are FINALLY going to the beach after 3 months of being in the Caribbean!  We are staying with friends for 5 days and will be celebrating my birthday there…yippeee!  (Samba gets to come too…double yippee!!!  My family is coming too…triple yippee!!!)

In any case, I’m going to keep this post short and let the pics from our class speak for themselves:

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xo A

Tags: art, children's art, fabric scraps, fun, puppets, recycled art