art lab news

https://sites.google.com/cps.edu/waters-art-lab/home

All students, K-8 will be sharing our S1 artworks with the Waters Fine Arts community in our visual art exhibit opening this month! We will be acting as docents, participating in scavenger hunts and creating some original 3D artworks in our Critter Club Craft Corner to honor our many amazing artists and their hard work this semester! All students are invited to attend all arts activities and join us in our raffle prize event.

We will also be showcasing our Día de los Muertos Community Ofrenda & Pop-up Gallery! What fun!

HOW TO EARN RAFFLE TICKETS AT THE EVENT...EVERYTHING IS FREE:))!

Raffle tickets earned throughout the Eco-Arts Fest experience! Raffle tickets will be earned by practicing improvisation in Music and Drama Labs, creating artworks at Critter Club's Craft Kiosks, and talking to docents to complete our Exhibit Art Find.

Raffle tickets will be used to barter/purchase at the Eco-Art Market with Eco-Tech Kids:)! ) PLEASE JOIN US!

If you can help with this event, please email me, alvecchioni@cps.edu. Thank you for your COMMUNITY AND SUPPORT!

Please check out the flyer below for more information and schedule details---:)).

COME FOR AN HOUR OR ALL DAY...We can't do it without you!

December 9-13, 2024!

Please sign up here using Sign-up Genius!

https://www.signupgenius.com/go/60B0B48ACAD2DA7F58-53577811-s12024

Thanks in advance!

Kinder, 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th...So many stories...

WHAT A JOYFUL EXPERIENCE FOR ALL! We can't wait to share our MS AS1 PASSION PROJECTS with you at our upcoming show! In fact, we have a SLIME TEAM creating SEL gifts to share at the event! They might even be conducting a tutorial for little ones---:))!

(If anyone has laundry detergent to donate---please drop it in the Main Office. THANK YOU!)

210's artist study of Frida Kahlo and her celebration of her Indigenous ancestry is getting more and more color-FULL! Don't miss these vibrant artworks out at our upcoming show on the 13th:)!

Throughout November we looked at a variety of American Indian creation stories and compared common and diverse elements in each rendering---building knowledge and understanding for all!

We will continue this journey throughout December---studying American Indian winter storytelling and looking at the ancestral design motifs of Pueblo culture---sharing some of my favorite Indigenous art forms...

Our Pueblo Rain Bird Storytellers will be the culminating artworks of our S1 show as I look forward to an art-filled sojourn revisiting Sante Fe's Indigenous art galleries and Taos Pueblo over Winter Break--- to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary:))! Stay tuned for more clayworks this spring...

Inukshuks as a form of silent cultural and community language across the centuries and continents...

These old and new Inuit storytelling monuments of the Arctic regions have numerous voices, intentions and community references in a landscape often barren of people. Some share good hunting sites, some act as mapmakers and some are cold weather ofrendas to loved ones who have passed...

This project was adapted from our recent CPSArts Elementary Visual Arts Communities of Practice Team kick-off at the Museum of Contemporary Art. At that event, we looked at Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in the wake of pandemic learning with Dr. E'Toyare McDonald-Williams and Carrie Carlson. To learn more about overcoming trauma-impacted childhood learning, https://www.bevictorieus.com/

6th-8th graders are imbuing their Inuit-inspired cairns* to share WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY ARE GRATEFUL FOR in their community---Chicago 2024! These ROCKS CAN TALK:))!

* A cairn is a human-made pile (or stack) of stones raised for a purpose, usually as a marker or as a burial mound. The word cairn comes from the Scottish Gaelic: càrn.

Welcome Back! I hope everyone had a restorative week of gratitude and a reflective Native American Heritage Day! We have SO MUCH to share as we wrap up 2024's Semester 1 in the Art Lab:)...

We are launching December with creative force in the Art Lab! We are culminating our S1 projects and preparing for student-directed authentic assessment of the four National Core Arts Standards---Creating, Connecting, Performing and Presenting---with our annual S1 Visual Art Exhibit:))! Look for all of our great work from Semester 1 to be showcased throughout the Main Lobby. Our community festival and fine arts event will be December 13, 2024 (3-5PM). All Pre-K-8th grade families are invited:)! Please join us as we round out 2024 with friendship, love and joy together.

Our multi-modal, literacy-based arts integration projects this month begin with Kindergartners busy learning basic color theory (warm and cool color families:)) and scale drawing as they create their first self-portraits of their school experience. We are practicing basic watercolor experimentation, "Water, Paint, Paper!" and NOT mixing colors in the paintbox... Our realistic renderings are rooted in three identity and empathy stories---When We Are Kind, You Hold Me Up and I Hope (Monica Gray Smith). These intergenerational books are all bilingual in Navajo or Cree and English. We are also looking at the human face as a series of halves (basic proportional illustration) identifying how we all are the same--- but also different (eye color, skin color, hair color and texture). We will be creating first-steps woven frames for these amazing artworks to share our interconnections as a community of friends---across culture, time and space.

1st grade is creating brightly colored sweet grass and reclaimed yarn and ribbon tapestries based on our reading of Stolen Words (Melanie Florence) to act like an identity alphabet as we learn basic textile knotting and design skills. We are using garden sticks as our loom frame and adapting the purpose of creating a Cree dream catcher from this powerful story rooted in honest history, empathy and love as we make our own tactile self-portrait. As we wrap-up our tapestries, we will be reading Thunder Boy Jr. (Sherman Alexie), a Spokane and Choctaw story about identity and naming ourselves---to reiterate how our voice matters in all that we do.

2nd & 3rd graders learned about a popular Indigenous cultural tradition for holidays as we prepared for Thanksgiving celebrations and Native American Peoples' Day. Our text, Fry Bread (Kevin Noble Maillard), is a Seminole story that shares the recipe and joy of making fry bread for all sorts of celebrations. In 3rd grade we linked this story to our final day of weaving our bamboo baskets--- and hope to try the fry bread recipe with Pilot Light and Ms. Berezka later in December:). In 2nd grade we connected this family tradition (and procedural text) to Frida Kahlo's celebration of her Indigenous heritage and her love for her childhood home---and especially for her grown-up kitchen as a center to share love with her family. 2nd graders have painted the exterior of their Casa Azul puppet theatre vivid blue and the inside walls bright yellow. We will be creating the interior features of Frida's ancestral home using pop-up techniques and paper collage. Our Frida & Diego puppets will our last step in this artist study. I'm hoping some of our set designers will create a performance for you at our upcoming visual art opening...Fingers crossed!

5th graders are busy weaving storyteller baskets in colorful sweet grass and raffia. Each basket is an abstraction of one of the Art Lab's selection of American Indian texts--- using colors as symbols for the main ideas of their chosen story. Their picture books choices are non-fiction biographical texts, ancestoral legends and fictional renderings of historical events or everyday experiences of diverse American Indians. Some baskets symbolize Autumn Peltier's teenage experience as an Anishinaabe water warrior and her current struggle for water quality and Indigenous rights in Canada. Some baskets symbolize the Cherokee Trail of Tears or the true story of Hiawatha as a Mohawk peacemaker. Some baskets share the cultural significance of pow-wows in Indigenous life and some honor the Three Fires water walkers of the Great Lakes. It was fun to hear students discuss and defend their individual choices when they created their book reviews! I look forward to reading their final text recommendations at our upcoming art show:)...

Room 307 will be featuring their bling-embellished retablos at Backlot Coffee throughout the holiday season! Our soft opening will be the 3rd week of December. More information to follow soon. Room 308's calavera clayworks are currently featured in our Día de los Muertos Pop-up Gallery. Both venues offer and support student voice, arts integrated learning, authentic assessment and community conversations in diverse ways. More external exhibit events are being worked on for Spring Semester. (Please share if you have any community connections:)!) Many thanks to Mr. Cederquist for donating the mirror-like bases of our calavera portraits---what a joyous way to upcycle:)!

As 3rd and 5th graders wrap up their weavings this week, we will begin a line composition that looks at Pueblo design motifs and their ancient roots. We will be reading When Clay Sings (Byrd Baylor), an illustrated poem that shares the mystery and excitement of uncovering ancient art forms. Baylor's text shares the wonder of what fragments of found pottery can tell us (or not) about the people who made them hundreds of years ago... Many of the illustrations by Tom Bahti are accurate renderings of pots that were once made by the Mimbre, Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi), Mogollon and Hohokom cultures---prehistoric ancestors of today's Pueblo tribes. Students will be choosing rain bird motifs and abstract border patterns to "make" a new clay pot. Students will use a limited color palette in their illustrations---black, white and terracotta---to honor the powerful simplicity of the original designs. As they finish, they will narrate the story their new pot tells...

As 6th grade is connecting to many of their ELA writing topics, as they join 7th and 8th graders to make identity cairns based on the cultural history of Inuit inukshuks. Our Inuit-inspired project started with a community group think based on what we know, value and want in our community here in Chicago. We utilized questions about our community to get the conversation started. We then worked on the idea what is important to us and what we are grateful for in our community and life experience. We unpacked the many meanings and uses for inukshuks in Inuit culture utilizing video as text and talked about how these silent stones are great communicators across thousands of miles. Students were asked to decide what are the essential ideas/traits/objects they would use to define themselves if they could make a pile of rocks talk... We are now moving to creating watercolor resist renderings of our own ideas of belonging and community.

7th and 8th graders just finished abstract weavings based on "A Love Letter to Future Me." They first created their letter and then chose how to render it a variety of textiles. They used color and texture to create the setting of their letter and their weave created the narration. They painted these mini looms and will share their stories in fabric and words at our upcoming art exhibit. These multi-media affirmations are truly beautiful...

All classes are moving to the poetry elements of their visual journals. Students have put tons of work into their mixed-media experiments and will finish their journals in January. We will not be presenting them at our art show but will be creating a Literary Salon presentation after Winter Break to share with our peers and encourage journaling as positive self-talk and a way to celebrate ourselves every day. Look for more information on this event in our January newsletter!

All students enjoyed our video text "Film Festival" of Native American creation myths throughout November. We analyzed and compared the videos to each other and to our various read alouds throughout the month. We also read/viewed Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun's Thanksgiving Story (Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry and Alexis Bunten) as we approached our holiday break. This story shares how children today from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe learn the story of Weeâchumun (corn) and the first Thanksgiving. This video-text comparison created a common knowledge for all students as we created Circle Stories and Tapestry Tales 2024---our upcoming art show.

Again, my deepest gratitude in this time of thanksgiving and I hope to see you on the 13th:))!

With Kindness,

Mrs. Vecchioni

We will be wrapping up S1 after Winter Break. I will miss our great experiences of this semester so much...Thank you EVERYONE!

We will begin the new year (and ending our semester) looking at the Modernist artist and trailblazer Georgia O'Keeffe. We will talk about how Georgia changed perspectives on we look at art and changed how women artists were perceived in the 20th Century.

She was always creating NEW WAYS to look...and to LOOK CLOSELY....

Georgia O'Keeffe lived to be 98---November 15, 2024 would have been her 137th birthday---<3!

We are an ensemble of parents, students, teachers and staff that are excited about fine arts programming---exhibits, performances, showcases, arts festivals and literary salon events. We need your ideas and enthusiastic spirit to help us give Waters kids the BEST arts education we can...

We build community together and have a lot of FUN:)!

ALL ARE WELCOME!

We will NOT be having a formal DECEMBER meeting. PLEASE SAVE-THE-DATE for volunteering to hang our S1 Visual Art Show. We will have our OPENING DECEMBER 13, 2024. We will need volunteers throughout the week of December 9-13, 2024. Please sign-up to volunteer above:). Thanks in advance!

Otsaliheliga:)!

🌀ALL STUDENT Wavemaker Art Clubs are on THURSDAYS in DECEMBER:)! Please note meeting dates on our calendar below: If no school, no meeting. Thanks in advance! 🌀

2024-2025 Wavemaker ART-IN-ACTION Clubs include:

KIDS Arts Leadership Team (ALT) & CRITTER CLUB (5-8)

FIRST THURSDAY & THIRD THURSDAY EACH MONTH (3PM - 5PM)

SEMESTER 1 MEET DATES

• 10/3, 10/17
• 11/7, 11/21
• 🐰12/5, 12/19 🐰
• 🐰 Special Meet Date: December 13, 2024 (Critter Club Craft Kiosks:)!) 🐰

Wavemakers Arts Advocacy & Grrl Scout Troupe #27333 (1-4)

SECOND & FOURTH THURSDAY EACH MONTH (3PM - 5PM)

SEMESTER 1 MEET DATES

• 10/10, 10/24
• 11/14
• 🌎12/12 🌎

*LUNCH CREW LITERARY SALON LIBRARIANS (2 & 3 grades) & CRITTER CLUB (4-6 grades) will be each Wednesday this year! Let Mrs. Vecchioni know if you are interested in joining us:)!*

From CPSArts:

"As a Fine & Performing Arts School with Demonstration Site Status, your school will receive the following:

Badge Certification
Feel free to use this official badge on all school print and virtual documents.

Innovation Grant
Your school will receive a $10,000.00 innovation grant to support the expansion of your arts and arts integration curricula into contemporary and innovative spaces. We encourage you to consider emerging technologies in artistic disciplines and arts integration. We will release further guidance on how to spend these funds as we approach the start of the school year.

Increased Visibility
Your school will become a beacon of inspiration, hosting visits from teachers and administrators at other Fine & Performing Arts Schools who want to learn from your strengths.

Teacher Leadership Opportunities
Your teachers will join a pool of presenters for Fine & Performing Arts Schools professional development, and they will have opportunities to share their successes and experiences with their peers.

Lending Library Early Adopters
Your school will have the opportunity to be an early adopter of the Fine & Performing Arts Schools Lending Library, which will include advanced and specialized art-making equipment. We will issue guidance for how to access this library around the start of the school year."

*This great news and more was cited from The FULL REPORT below. Check it out:)!