Archive for February, 2009

I thought the light falling inside this camelia looked nice so I snapped this picture of a dying flower.

Today, I presented my Wolfsnail talk to the Tau chapter of the Delta Kappa Gamma professional honor society. This international group promotes the professional and personal development of its members (women educators) and excellence in education. One librarian told me she already had Wolfsnail in her library. In order to prepare for the presentation, my sons helped me put the Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Book stickers on all my books. It was (as always around here) quite a family production.

I’ve been asked to be an adjunct faculty member at the 2009 Writing From Nature workshop put on by the Highlights Foundation in Boyds Mills, Pennsylvania. I will be teaching photography and talking about the creative process behind Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator. It will be held April 22-26. I attended the same workshop two years ago and I learned a lot. When I sent my editor the Wolfsnail revision about two months after the workshop (essentially a total re-write with just about all new pictures), he declared it “light years ahead of where we were.”

Just like two years ago, Mark Baldwin, education director at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, will lead the workshop. I detailed some of what I learned about nature journaling here. You can read details about this year’s workshop (including information about the wonderful site) here.

I’ve included photographs I took during the 2007 workshop in this post. You can see an album of photographs from April 2007 here.

In a few weeks, I will start my work with second graders at Davis Magnet IB World School, teaching photography as a way to deepen their study of their neighborhood. I wanted to start by exposing students to great documentary photography. I thought immediately of Roland Freeman, a photographer whose work I admire and who has been a friend of our family for more than 30 years. Freeman, winner of the  National Endowment for the Arts 2007 Bess Lomax Hawes Award, has two projects that I thought fit particularly well: “Stand By Me: African American Expressive Culture in Philadelphia” (some photos from this project made up a National Geographic spread/article) and “The Arabbers of Baltimore.”

Choosing Freeman made good practical sense, too, because I am able to create a portable “gallery” for the students to view. I’ll take framed posters of these exhibits from my walls at home and set them up in the school auditorium. The above image is from the Arabbers exhibit. Freeman’s photographs document neighborhoods in Philadelphia and Baltimore that our students will likely find familiar, but also different.

Another early step was deciding just how the students would take photographs. We wanted to take digital images, but we had limited money to spend on materials and supplies. I learned that Davis already owned two digital cameras that students could use. They were Kodak Easyshare 863 cameras. We decided we would take the students out on their photography field trip in groups of six students; we wanted to have at least three cameras so they could pair-up. One student would take photos; the other would take notes. Because we found these cameras at a great discount and because the PTA pledged some money to the project, we were able to get two, which brings the Davis collection up to four. This way a teacher and/or parent helper will also be able to take photographs and we’ll have a back-up if something goes wrong. Some projects I’ve read about use disposable cameras, but one of the goals of the Ask For More Arts collaborative is that the schools will be able to continue these projects in future years, without the aid of an artist. We needed to make sure the tools would continue to be available after the grant ended.

In order to get the students ready to use the cameras, the teachers will ask the students to develop a set of essential agreements for using the digital cameras. I developed a hand-out that will serve as a basic how-to manual, photocopying selectively from the company’s manual. Each student will make a how-to book during the lead-up to our photography field trip — during a center time in the classroom. In my next post, I’ll share the curriculum objectives we will meet with this project and how they inform the content of my first talk with the students.

Making a living as an artist is not always easy and it often involves developing skills unrelated to making art. Over the next two months, I will be working with second grade students and teachers at Davis Magnet IB World School. This project is being made possible by Parents for Public Schools of Greater Jackson and its Ask for More Arts collaborative. Participating schools are charged with developing a unit of study around the theme “community.” It must meet curriculum objectives  both in the arts and in traditional academic subjects such as language arts, math, social studies and science.

I had two reasons for being enthusiastic about this project — first, my three sons attended Davis. It was with Davis students and teachers that we first shared the story of our wolfsnails. I learned much of what I know about writing for children by making books for and with Davis students. There was “Growing Salad” (photo illustrated and bound in a standard school folder) with first graders who planted seeds and “How the Princess Got Her Name” (illustrated by Richard with markers and slid into the pages of a photo album) with kindergartners who were learning about naming.

The second reason is that Davis is an International Baccalaureate school and teachers are trained to take a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching. Signing up for this project meant I would join a team of teachers and other school staff members to create a model lesson for arts integration. Working from the community theme, the Davis team decided they wanted to develop a unit for their second graders, who were scheduled to spend six weeks learning about how individuals and groups work together to build and maintain a neighborhood. They asked that I join the team in the role of artist — but this time they wanted my expertise in photography, not writing. I will be working with second grade teachers Karen Jones and Beth West, gifted education teacher Kacy Hellings, IB coordinator Julie Frate, literacy coach Rose Willis, and parents Phaedra Robinson and Terrence Spann.

We’ve spent time together three times now; the first two sessions involved brainstorming, planning, and a little training. During our third session, yesterday, we did a preview of the central activity we’ll do with the students: we took a walk around the Davis neighborhood, visiting people in houses and businesses near the school and discovering for ourselves some of the things we expect the students will discover on their walk. The students will have digital cameras so they can photograph the neighborhood. I took the photographs that are interspersed in this post. I’ll talk in future posts about the process of developing a lesson plan that integrates photography into the study of a neighborhood. The other subjects are reading, language, math, and social studies.

Richard took this over the weekend. I’m going to let it double count for Photo Tuesday and the Photo Friday Challenge, the theme for which is “costume.” I suppose putting on jewelry is a form of costuming. So, not too much of a stretch. Richard used his Nikon D200 with a Nikon f1.8 50mm prime lens.