Week 4: Connecting Art Making To Emotion

Hello everyone! This week was much busier than the last two and I am eager to share what went on at BASIS Independent Brooklyn and RHAP with you all!

This week the BASIS students were working on their self-portraits in both the 2nd and 4th grades. The 4th graders were eager for me to come and sit with them during class as I have really bonded with them. For the first time with the BASIS classes, I was teaching and helping them get the proportions right in their portraits. This class was also interesting from an emotional regulation standpoint as there is more frustration in trying to make things realistic with self-portraits than with coloring beetles as they did previously. They all put a lot of pressure on themselves to make it look realistic and there was differentiation in the way they dealt with feeling overwhelmed. Most students were laughing at themselves and even more impressively uplifting and encouraging their peers to be giggly and calm as well. The fourth graders were much better at this than the second graders. Among the second graders there was a lot of sadness and getting them to be easy on themselves was harder. I helped them by sitting with them and encouraging them to keep going. At the end of the class, I pulled a second grader inside and offered her a hug, telling her that when I made my portrait it was really bad and hers was already so much better than what I could do. This made her happier and hopefully next class she will be able to change her mindset a bit! – I will keep you updated.

At RHAP the first day was more focused on finishing older projects. For the whole class, I was talking with older students about friendship stress and school while giving advice on how to approach those challenging times with the right mindset. I spoke to one student while she was painting and one while she was taking a break from her painting to eat her snack. I found that when talking with the student who was painting her thoughts were very genuine and fluid whereas the student who wasn’t painting seemed more in her head and unable to articulate how she was feeling. Later in the week, we had an interior design drawing class where students spread out and picked a corner of the room to draw. I got to see the other interns learning how to draw perspective with the teacher and see little kids get really precise with their drawings. Overall it was an amazing week!

In the coming weeks, I plan to create my parent survey and start finalizing the questions I am going to ask.