The weather is awful It seems as if Winter will never go away. However in the mornings there are some really beautiful skies. Trying to reproduce them in Art Rage really makes my day happy.

 I am so pleased to have the chance to teach Primary 1 at a really nice school and am so glad of my art training and study over the last while because it has given me a great grounding in how to teach art at the early stages.
This week the children brought in some junk which was used to build a castles with. Very sculptural I hear you say! The junk was proudly brought in and we discussed what type of shapes we had. Everything from toilet rolls to hairspray cans were brought in- not recommended due to health and safety issues.It was amazing to watch how many different designs of castles were made from a small selection of junk. The children were able to say how some junk could be cut up to make balustrades and one girl brought in a lace to make part of a drawbridge.
I like this school because the children are always asked what they know about a subject and that is how one finds out the extent of their knowledge. We also made play - dough and this tied in with maths because we were measuring. We thought we could sell the play dough around the school and this would be called Enterprise. With Valentine's Day coming up there are many great opportunities to make cards hearts and flowers.I would really like to be able to borrow something from a museum this term as we were encouraged to do so..
It is interesting for me to discover that people do use an aesthetic judgement regularly. I had thought that to be the case after having my eyes opened to this truth after an Art Workshop in Glasgow. We were asked to go on a playful walk and look with childlike eyes on our surroundings. As a visual learner my focus was on colour and pattern and the first really hit me as it said PINK and was in huge polystyrene letters inside a man's shirt shop window. Why ? I wondered as I saw a man carrying a striped pink and white paper bag with red handles out of the shop. He looked happy and so did his wife. I began to think that retail therapy is an artistic pursuit.
After studying this for a while it does seem to exist and is called aesthetic judgements and according to some very prominent people like John Dewey and Elliot Eeisner - it does exist and even the surgeon uses it in his/her work as does everyone and I can see it in the way shops display their wares.

We even use this judgement to dress attractively and so surely any one with business sense would need to ensure that the design and set up of their shop was done with an appropriate aesthetic judgement for their clients..

Here is a picture done by our son - the picture is me looking at the stars.See above.