Archive for November, 2009

I am always trying to improve my system. I have known since the beginning of blogging that I should be embedding watermarks into my photographs. But there’s often a gap between what I know I should do and what I have the time, energy, and knowledge to do. In this case, the process is fairly simple — once I got around to it.

In Lightroom, which is the program I use to process and catalog my photographs, there is a function for exporting photographs. I have to run the export function in order to transform my photographs from raw images into jpgs for posting on the blog. In the right hand column, in the metadata menu, there is a copyright option. I typed Sarah & Richard Campbell in that field. Then, with the photo selected, I clicked on the file menu and clicked on export. In the export dialogue box I checked a box next to the Add Copyright Watermark field. Apparently, it is not possible with Lightroom to customize the placement of the watermark. If you know different, please comment and let me know. How do you other bloggers handle watermarking?

Continuing with the website updates, you can look at the photographs from our recent Tuscon trip in the gallery section of my website.

This may be the last of the Tuscon photographs. Richard converted it to black and white. We have been updating and upgrading around here. You may notice some new things on the blog. To the left I have added more links to the blogs of fellow Southern Breezers. If I have left someone out, please comment to let me know. I am still building my list. Richard converted the Tuscon sunrise photograph to a wallpaper file. It is very nice!

I now work with a webcam attached to my monitor. It’s a little disconcerting to have this eyeball like thing staring back at me. I am practicing using Skype (which I hope to use to do virtual school visits soon) by calling Richard’s parents in England. Unfortunately, right now the news from there involves major surgery and lots of anxiety about its outcome. But it is nice to be able to see Silvana and Tony while we talk. They enjoy seeing their grandsons.

We got some nice quiet rain today and we have been having a nice day in our basement lair. Two of the boys are helping blog/website maintenance. Richard and D are playing ping-pong. It is a good start to a much-needed week off.

Today at McLeod we pulled the Kodak Easyshare M380 cameras out of their boxes and the students started taking photographs. The fifth graders started by taking pictures of each other. We had the class divided into six groups of four students each. I led three groups at a time with hands-on camera work and my two teacher partners, Mrs. Courson and Mrs. McBride, took turns leading the other three groups on a walk around the school grounds.

They were looking for specific examples of plant and animal life. The next time we go out the groups will be taking photographs of some of the living things in the McLeod Schoolyard so we can make a Schoolyard Field Guide. This is a JumpstArt arts integration project sponsored by Ask For More Arts, a partnership spearheaded by Parents for Public Schools of Greater Jackson.

The students did a pre-assessment which asked them to list the producers, consumers, and decomposers in the schoolyard. We will ask them for this information in a different way once we have completed our field guide. We are confident that they’ll engage these concepts more deeply as they produce a schoolyard field guide. Some of the living things on their lists from today’s brief walk were: butterflies, oak trees, moles (when I asked about the mole, they said they had seen evidence of moles in disturbed dirt), blueberry bushes, mushrooms, and poison ivy. We are going to need some good field guides of trees, plants, insects, reptiles, and birds. If anyone has any books they’d like to let us borrow or have for our project, please get in touch with me.

My newest arts integration project begins in earnest today at McLeod Elementary School. I am partnering with a class of 5th graders to make a schoolyard field guide. We’re calling the project “It’s Alive!” and we’re using a book called No Student Left Indoors by Jane Kirkland. You may have noticed my recent spate of nature/science /art workshops. I am learning more every day about how to integrate the four things I love: nature, writing, photography, and teaching.

After my most recent workshop, I wrote about mistaking the stuffed hawk for a live one, but I didn’t show you any of the work I created in the class. Here’s the piece I like the best. I used a rubber dog’s paw. I inked it with black ink and pressed it down four times. Then, when it looked like a flower, I filled in some color with a red marker. This was part of a lesson called Tracks.

Hester Bass did a fabulous job at Power APAC today introducing visual arts students from grades 6 through 12 to the creative process of writing picture books. In the above photograph, she is reading from The Secret World of Walter Anderson, which was recently named one of Kirkus’ Best Children’s Books of 2009. Because she worked so closely with her fantastic illustrator, E.B. Lewis, she also shared much about the process of illustrating a picture book with watercolor paintings. Power APAC students had studied Walter Anderson’s work prior to Hester’s visit and had also done some historical research, but her tale sparked a renewed interest in his work and life.

Hester’s publicist at Candlewick worked with Mississippi Public Broadcasting to set up an interview for an online program titled Don’t Lecture Me. The show will go online in about two weeks.

Students provided a back drop for a mini-set on the Power APAC stage. It was a pleasure for me to see Hester in action. I always learn from my colleagues in this business. Hester’s stage presence was obvious from the moment she stepped in front of the students. She sang and she read. She encouraged the students to read, to write (and sketch) in journals, and to set goals. She got questions about publishing and about Walter Anderson. One student wanted to know about the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs.

I never posted the rest of the photos from our Tuscon trip so here goes.

Now, for the animals.

I attended a workshop at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science on using art to teach science. Teachers who were in Jackson for the Mississippi Art Education Association conference had the chance to earn continuing education credits for attending the workshop. I was there to learn more about writing lesson plans to formalize the teaching I do in my school residencies. The first thing we did was go out onto the trails behind the museum to draw what we saw. Our teacher was Limeul Eubanks, director of visual arts and library media services at the state Department of Education.

He pointed out this beautiful bird and I tiptoed up and started sketching — as fast as I could. I don’t draw very fast or very well, but I was determined to get something down before this bird moved. Then, after I had a quick sketch, I took a few photos. I winced as the shutter clicked and looked sheepishly at Limeul. Remarkably, the bird kept still. I had time to make another quick sketch.

Several groups of students came through. As they approached us, they quieted down and started tiptoeing and staring at the bird. Several asked whether the bird was real. I said, “Yes, I saw its head move.” Several of the high school boys seemed so interested in the drawing we were doing that one of the teachers tore some pages out of her journal and handed them each a pencil. Upon learning that most of us were art teachers, the boys said they didn’t have art at their school.

At the end of our session outside, one of Limeul’s helpers reached over into the leaves and picked up the bird’s stand. It was stuffed. I was floored. And embarassed. I told the kids who came back through and saw the bird being walked into the museum that I hadn’t told them anything I didn’t believe myself. I have always been a trusting soul. It turns out I could have gotten a good bit closer and gotten a really nice shot. We went out again later in the morning and picked up leaves. I found this beauty. It didn’t even fit in my bag.

For me, a good novel is peopled by characters so real you feel you know them. This was how it was with Ray and Jose, the teenagers at the center of Paul Griffin’s Ten Mile River. The boys, who met and bonded during a stint in juvenile detention, have cobbled together a life on the margins in New York City. They steal food, grills, and cars, but they also share scarce food with a passel of mutts, wrestle and make jokes about body smells, noises and haircuts. Ray meets Trini during a trip to the braid shop for his weekly haircut. Though smitten, he introduces Trini to Jose and watches helplessly as they get together. Trini’s aunt Yolie, the big-hearted proprietor of the braid shop, offers the boys the closest thing to hope and normalcy they’ve seen for a while. Despite Trini’s urging and Yolie’s offer of honest work, the boys can’t quite extricate themselves from their thieving associates.

The narrative power of this slim volume is strong. I didn’t want to put it down; I devoured it in two sittings.

Luckily, I had Griffin’s the orange houses to pick up next. In it, I met the unforgettable Mik Sykes, Jimmi Sixes, and Fatima. I swallowed this one in a single sitting/lying down. Mik can’t hear well and likes to let the world fade into the background. Jimmi is a mentally ill vet and street poet. Fatima is a refuge from a failed African nation with a talent for folding paper. Griffin brings them together in a powerful story of friendship.

If I were teaching high school English or facilitating a book group with young adults, I would suggest these books. Griffin is a skilled writer who has spent enough time with adolescents in tough circumstances to pick up the lingo, to see through their tough outer shells, and to examine their deepest desires.

I am glad I met Griffin at the recent Mississippi Library Association conference. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more of his work.

I spent an interesting day and a half at the fall conference of the Mississippi Environmental Education Alliance (MEEA). I brought a wolfsnail (thanks to my friend Julie’s kids) to my presentation. Terri Jacobson is looking at the snail with a private eye loupe. I attended Jacobson’s private eye workshop and I learned a lot that I’ll use in my work with kids. Using a private eye is the next best thing to having a camera kitted out with a macro lens. I had a fun time coming up with “it looks like … ” lists for a gum ball from a sweet gum tree (scarab beetle, pecan shell innards, baby bird’s beak, etc.) and a sprig of flowers.

Nicole Smith and Andrea Schumann, who work in education and naturalist outreach at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, and I worked together to come up with a list of things our sprigs of queen anne’s lace reminded us of and then we wrote a poem using words from our list. We wrote a fib poem. (The lines have syllables in this pattern: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8, like the Fibonacci sequence.)
Star
Burst
Spider
Crawling ‘cross
Dandelion puff
Hunting for a cotton lollipop

Another great part of the MEEA conference for me was an introduction to Robin Whitfield and her work. Robin introduced herself as an explorer, which she says is a hard job description for people to understand.

They are more accepting of the title “artist,” but Robin doesn’t believe “artist” fully captures what she does. She spends much of her time outside — exploring, creating, and teaching. Using methods such as observational drawing, printing, stenciling, dipping, and pigment sampling, Robin interacts with swamps and other natural settings. A member of the Mississippi Arts Commission’s artist roster, Robin has worked with boys and girls clubs, alternative schools, middle school science students, and adults. My friend, Julie, attended Robin’s hands-on workshop and put up a blog post, including a photo gallery here.

The MEEA conference was sponsored by the Mississippi Urban Forestry Council and Donna Yowell, the executive director, shared some interesting projects the council sponsors for kids and schools. Older students, in particular, can get involved in inventorying green spaces in their communities and presenting landscaping improvement plans to local governing bodies. Schools can apply for grants to add trees to their campuses to provide shade, buffers, or edible fruit. Yowell said students get excited about a computer tool that allows them to do a virtual makeover.

My friend, Hester Bass, wrote an extraordinary picture book biography of Walter Anderson, a great American artist who did most of his work in Mississippi. Publisher’s Weekly called the The Secret World of Walter Anderson, published by Candlewick Press, “a powerful tribute to the lengths artists will go for their passions.” A starred reivew in Kirkus said it was “a gorgeous chronicle of a versatile southern American artist.”

The story is illustrated by E.B. Lewis; an additional 8-page author’s note gives more details about Anderson’s life and includes photographs of his paintings, linocuts, and decorations on pottery. I interviewed Hester last month at the Writing and Illustrating for Kids conference put on by the Southern Breeze regional chapter of SCBWI. Click on the play button below to hear why Hester wrote the book and to hear her read an excerpt.

Hester is heading to Mississippi next week for a brief tour that will include stops in Jackson and Vicksburg. She’ll be signing books at the Mississippi Museum of Art on Saturday, Nov. 14; Lemuria bookstore on Sunday, Nov. 15; and she’ll be doing a school visit at my kids’ school, Power Academic and Performing Arts Complex, on Tuesday, Nov. 17. You can catch her in Vicksburg at Lorelei Books on Monday, November 16. Click on Hester’s website or on the venue’s links to check times for the public events. Hester, who once delivered singing telegrams, is an engaging performer and her book would make an excellent gift for the kids, teachers, and art lovers on your Christmas list.

Please let me know if you like the video interview. I am experimenting with using more video on my blog. I’d like to use more video to show my work process with photography. Let me know what you think.