July 26, 2018
In this week's PTC Weekly, find out how to make the most realistic cave paintings, and which PTC team member makes the best fresh lemonade! 🍋🍋🍋
WEISSENSEE
On Monday, Manon and some volunteers took the kids to the Tierpark zoo in Lichtenberg as an introduction to our new Animal painting series. We decided to bring the kids to the zoo so that they could see some exotic animals up close, and use this as inspiration in their future art.
The children were all super excited to go on a trip with us. Many of them had never visited the zoo before, and they were delighted to see so many different animals, including monkeys, goats, elephants and crocodiles. It was a really fun day, but super exhausting because of the hot weather.
The next day we did 'cave paintings' with the kids, who all still had the zoo trip fresh in their minds. Using brown paper and chalks, they drew their pictures, smudging and dabbing with the chalk to create an earthy, primeval vibe. To finish the look, we crumpled t...
July 10, 2018
We have had an exciting and busy week at Pass the Crayon: In Weissensee, we continued our workshop series learning about diversity through journalism, and our week came to a close with Welcome Camp, a day-long conference with other organizations and individuals dedicated to improving the lives of refugees in Berlin.
WEISSENSEE JOURNALISM PROJECT
This week, we continued our workshop series on diversity and journalism. We began by teaching the kids about different countries and their cultures, and giving them opportunities to share their own knowledge about the world. Then, we launched into journalism mode- each kid chose a country and role (reporter, moderator, interviewer, etc.)
The workshop continued over the following days, and volunteers helped kids write scripts and questions. When everyone knew what they would be saying, we had a trial run where kids practiced speaking in front of the camera, allowing them to develop important public speaking skills. We ended the week by...
June 22, 2018
This week at PTC, we go collage-crazy with textile artist, Diane Levoie, and look forward to the exciting month ahead!
It has been a very exciting week here at Pass the Crayon. While we had just one workshop, we remained busy with new faces, and lots of looking ahead towards an action-filled next couple of weeks. We welcomed a few fresh interns, and got to know our wonderful artist of the week, Diane Levoie. Beyond the work surrounding our Tuesday workshop at Weissensee, we began planning for some exciting upcoming events, including our participation in Welcome Camp 2018 and our summer program with Kreativhaus in July!
WEISSENSEE
This week, kids at the Weissensee center used fabric, scissors, and glue to create colorful images through collage. Friend of Pass the Crayon and our Artist of the Week, Diane Levoie, a contemporary folk artist who specializes in creating fabric-based collage art, led this weeks session.
"Heading up the fabric collage workshop on June 12 was a great experie...
June 11, 2018
Welcome to this week's bumper edition of PTC Weekly. It's been a busy (and very colourful!) few weeks for us, filled with paint, mess and pieces of coloured paper...
PANKOW
Two weeks ago (June 3rd) we implemented our new 'Age Strategy'. We decided to do this because we have a large amount of kids to cater for at the Pankow shelter, and certain art activities are not suitable for younger years, and similarly, some of the older kids often do not wish to participate in activities that are not geared to their age range. For this reason we have introduced an age restriction. Our current series, "Painting like the Masters", is open to kids of 9 years and above. We decided to make this change because we realised that by working in smaller groups we can devote more attention to individual kids, they have the benefit of working in a quieter atmosphere, and our art activities can be specifically tailored to their age range.
This was the first week that we tried it, and it was re...
May 23, 2018
Another action-packed week for us at PTC. In Wedding, and Weisensee, we continued with our current painting and printing series, and in Pankow we welcomed our friends from Studio Brique for a special Dream Garden workshop!
This week we brought our Lichenstein project to Wedding, where Ayiat and Salaam attempted 'Coast Village' for the first time. Although they were both daunted by the complexity of the piece, with Salaam even commenting, "I can only finish this when I am dead", we were all really pleased with the amount of effort that the kids put in.
Although Salaam gave it a go, in the end he decided that he would prefer to do some independent painting, so he made a picture of his face instead. However, Ayiat ended up getting really involved with her painting, carefully adding layers and texture to create a very detailed work of art. She will finish her painting next week.
After the session, we all had some snacks, and Salaam mentioned that he wanted crisps, so we went to the...