Hello crafty kids and crafty grownups. Welcome to week two of our kids online gallery series for the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl. I’m Christine, and today we're going to be making some paper puppets. Now if we were making these all together over at The Annex where AAMP activities usually take place, we would have all kinds of gear for you, including some popsicle sticks, but I don't have any popsicle sticks at home, and maybe you don't either. So, for our paper puppets today, we're going to stick to them to some things that I have around the house. I have a plastic spoon, a metal straw, one plastic chopstick and a pencil. And so we're going to put our puppets right on there. As you can see, I've already made some puppet shapes, but I'm going to make some more for you, as we have a chat this morning. Well, as I chat, and you think about what kind of puppets you want to make. So we're going to start, I happen to have a notebook that has orange paper in it. But you can use plain paper, you can use construction paper, you can use whatever you want to make your art. That’s the beauty of doing arts and crafts - you are in control of how you make them. And when you're making them just for fun like we are today, it’s okay to make mistakes. It's okay to stop and start again. And it's okay to create things just the way you want them to look. So, I am going to make a pumpkin shape that’s just kind of round. And there's the pumpkin’s stem. Now some people like to put lines down on their pumpkin, you can do whatever you want. I'm going to give my pumpkin some nice big eyes, and some teeth. Now I'm going to pretend like I carved the pumpkin this time and not have lines across - see where the teeth are coming down, I brought the line down instead of putting it across and doing the teeth like I did when I did this pumpkin. See, I have the line I just added the green teeth, but this time I'm pretending that it's coming out of the orange pumpkin itself. But you don't have to do that, you can do it however you like. But I am going to borrow some things from my other pumpkin, I'm going to put some dots by the eyes, because I liked how that looked, and I'm going to give them a mustache. On that mustache, this one up here, I had just a curly mustache, but I think this one is going to have a big bushy mustache. What do you think of that? A pumpkin with a mustache! We could, if we were making a little play with our puppets later (and you can do that if you want) we could decide that this pumpkin was in disguise or maybe this pumpkin just likes the way they looked with the mustache. I feel like if they have mustache they need to have bushy eyebrows too. What do you think? There we go. Haha. Okay, here's our pretty happy pumpkin. With mustache and eyebrows. So let's cut out our pumpkin.

3 days 12 hours ago

Transcript: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Christine Hennebury, and I'm the Chair of the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl. I am your host for Flash Fiction Fridays, a series of short fiction lessons that are part of AAMP’s Fall for the Arts series. Each Friday, starting last week, and getting right to the end of November, I'm going to be offering you a short lesson about short format writing. Flash fiction is a story that's told in approximately 1000 words. You can tell your story as short as you want, or up to somewhere around 1000 words, we're not going to be super fussy about it because our purpose here is to get you playing with your creativity and however you do that, that really works well for us. So last week, our flash fiction prompt started with an image. I suggested that you just flash on the image of a park bench with a single glove left behind and think about the hows and the whys of how that glove came to be left. And so that's one way to start a flash fiction story. Today we're going to be starting with a moment, instead. So, the moment we're starting with is someone is locking the second lock on a door. That's intriguing isn't it? Because it's the second lock. The first lock is already locked but this person requires a second lock. And that's where your mind can really start going. So, you can grab a notebook or your phone to make notes in either dictation or typing it in, and you can think about why this person is locking the door. What kind of door is it? Who is this person? Are they locking someone out, or are they locking themselves in for protection? Or are they locking someone else or something inside of something else? You can think about what kind of locks there are. Are there more than two? If there are only two, is one just a regular lock on a doorknob and the other is a deadbolt? Or is it a lock that's closed with a latch that you then hook a whole lock into? Or is it none of those things? You're not limited in any way with those things, you can make them your own. You can decide the time that this is taking place, whether this is happening in medieval times, it's happening in the future, it happened yesterday. Maybe it’s been happening over and over. Any of those things are up to you but your goal is to take that moment and give it additional meaning, give it additional weight, make it matter, because when you start deciding the whys that go with that. Then you've made that moment matter. You have brought it forward from an idea, towards being a story you're starting to show how how things are changing from that moment. That decisive moment of locking is someone going from one state to another. That's them making a choice. And when you're adding choices for your characters, when you give those choices meaning, that’s when you're really really working on story. Now, if you tried to do some writing last week and it didn't work out, that’s totally fine. If you did a little bit of writing last week, that's great too. If you wrote a whole story, all good. All of those things are great because you're starting to open up your creative writing skills. It doesn't matter how far you've gotten, it's only matters that you're leaning towards moving forward with this. Try this week to spend a few minutes working on this, either to make some notes, to do some writing or to write a whole story. There's no wrong way to do this, there's no wrong amount to do it. Some people naturally have time for creativity built into their lives, and others of us have to build that capacity. So please don't judge yourself for what you weren't able to do, just celebrate what you WERE able to do. And this week, see what time you can carve out to spend with your creativity. And again, celebrate what you CAN do. Don’t worry that you don't have five hours, think ‘I've got three minutes. What can I do?’ So I really hope that you can spend some time playing with words today and playing with this concept of the second lock on the door. If you don't have time today, well, there's always tomorrow. You can pick out bits and pieces throughout your week. If you need some help or encouragement or you want to share what you have already, please feel free to join our flash fiction Fridays group. I'll put a link in the post about this video. I hope to see you next week for when we're going to be talking a bit about character, and how to add more depth to your characters, even in this very short format. It's been great chatting with you about flash fiction Fridays, and I look forward to seeing you again. Thanks everyone!

5 days 10 hours ago

I had fun doing these with my granddaughter.

 1 - 1 week 3 days ago

Hey everyone, this is Christine, and I'd like to welcome you to our very first video for our online gallery of arts and crafts for kids. So, the way this is going to work is that each week we're going to have a video that will have a craft project or an art project. You can follow along at home, make your own, and then you can send us a picture of what you did and we will put it in our gallery. You can tell your grown ups that we only want to put your first name or your initial with your art when it goes up online because we want everyone to stay safe. Okay, so today we're doing fingerprint aliens, and this is a fun little thing to do - I do this sometimes just to relax. But I know that some kids (and some adults) don't like to get their fingers dirty when they're doing art. So, I've come up with two plans today. The first one will be how to do it without getting your fingers full of paint and the other one will be how to do it if you don't mind getting a little paint on your hands. Let’s start with the one that you can do without getting your hands dirty. After all, we don't want anyone upset while they're trying to do some art, hey? Start by colouring in your background. Now I'm using what I would call a lead but what someone else might call a pencil crayon or a colouring pencil. But whatever it is, you know what I mean, whatever you want to call it. So here we go, here's my background, now I'm doing a quick job today instead of a careful job because I don't want to take too much of your time before you get into your own artwork. Oh my goodness. Okay, so here we go, I've got the background done. And now the next part - to put our alien in. I'm just taking a marker and making something that's sort of shaped like a thumbprint, it's kind of an oval. You could do the same thing with your lead /pencil crayons/whatever you call it, so you just make this sort of oval shape. And then you take another marker, usually one with a finer tip, and you add some details to it. So, you might add some antennae. Or maybe some little cat ears. Maybe one giant eye. I like to add some eyelashes over to the side. Let's give this one a beak, and then maybe one giant foot. And this one. Well, it sort of looks like a cat already with its little ears. So, let’s make it into even more of a cat. And maybe a smiley face, but let's just give it a little round feet like this, hey? Maybe with polka dots on them. And so there's our two aliens. Now we could add some detail in the back here or you could give them a hill to stand on. You could put a giant star in the sky. You can do whatever you want in the background. But that's the fun of it. So that's how to do it without getting your fingers dirty. Now, if you're okay with getting your fingers dirty, well then I have a different plan for you. So, just take your small piece of paper, (or large piece of paper, this is up to you) and get some paints. Now, I'm using just regular Crayola watercolours, as you can see over here, to paint this orangey-yellow in the background. I’m just covering the whole background, I'm just doing one colour, but you can do whatever colour, however many colours you want. You can sprinkle in any amount of colours. (Continued in next comment)

1 week 3 days ago

 1 - 1 week 3 days ago

1 week 3 days ago