art camp

In my former life, I was a teacher, or actually, I was what is more condescendingly known as a child care provider. 10-hour days, never getting to pee, not making enough money to even pay the rent... Anyway, I moved on because I had to. I was completely broke and completely burnt out. A few weeks ago I went back into a day care center and taught art for one week to kids ages 3 to 13. It made me wonder how I ever had the energy to do it, but it also made me miss teaching. It was so much fun, and the children were awesome.

Here's some of the stuff we made:

Thursday was robot day, and it was downright hilarious to watch the kids of all ages take tubes and bottles and build robots. The little ones all wanted to make Wall-E.


We also made bottles of hope and talked about what donating means. A lot of the kids seemed to get the concept and were happy to create something for the purpose of cheering up a sick person.


Each class made a group-effort pinata. The little ones made a big, crazy abstract design. The younger elementary kids made a jellyfish, which I thought was a fun idea. And the older class made this "bee transformer." What a hoot!
And here is that oldest class and me, posing at the end-of-week art show.


I'm teaching one more week in August. I'm looking forward to it, but I feel like I need to start banking sleep now.