Book of Home project at LaGuardia Senior Center.11 7/06/2021

 

LMCC - Creative Learning Grant Book of Home

Blog 11 7/06/2021

After my recent ill health, it was wonderful to be greeted by so many welcoming smiles and a round of applause. It really helps the healing process. Thank you. 

In the making of a unique pop-up book, which tells your personal stories, students work at their own pace, and we have found this to be the case, especially when teaching over zoom. As we are nearing the end of the book making process, our seniors are thinking carefully about their backgrounds and what they can put in the extended pages. We are so very impressed with how they have mastered the techniques of pop-up book making! 

We warmed up with a body extension activity, stretching our fingers, hands, wrists, and arms. Then we included a neck stretch for good measure. 

Alice has completed page 3, which reflects the family's optometrist business with images of spectacles. Page 4 is inspired by her trip to Cambodia. Lilly added shoes and a bucket to the foreground of her 3rd page repurposing images from the insert in a shower curtain she bought. We love recycling! In the pocket she placed her Key Words, “Surf’s Up” and added images of surfboards. In the extended page which featured a turtle she drew, she added beach towels. She used a child’s toy mermaid as the model to draw the pop-up in the second extension. 

As inspiration for page 3, Hilping chose as a photo of her grandson riding a toy car. She drew and colored a birthday image for the background and glued images of a jumble of houses on the cover of the extended page as she liked their bright colors. To create a sense of home, Hilping made a window and a clock to add to the background of her 4th page Situ has finished her 3rd page and selected a photo of her and her husband eating on the beach while fireworks explode behind them. She found just the image to use for her background. 

Chi is very proud of her son who plays the piano and guitar, so for the background of her 4th page she added images of musical instruments, a child swimming and a red cross, to indicate that he’s also a lifeguard and swim instructor. During class she made a large, bright red thumb up, which will feature in the extended page. Sam Sam chose for her 4th page a photo taken when she and her husband visited their daughter in California. She decided on drawing a house as the background. Yu Lan chose a photo of her son and daughter taken in Hong Kong, where they were born. She is also thinking of drawing a house as the background image for the 4th page and perhaps adding a drawing of a toy they played with in the extended page. 

A new technique we introduced today was how to make a box. The silhouette was attached to the box and glued in front of the background, making sure it remained within the page. This is very useful technique to learn as once mastered you can even build furniture, such as tables, chairs and even a bed. 

In order to help students who cannot think of what object to make for their extended pages, we discussed ideas with each, and Spica demonstrated how to create simple objects by drawing basic geometric shapes. A train begins as a rectangle with many small squares inside for windows, then you can add the train tracks underneath. A house is a series of squares and a triangle for the roof, and an apartment building is a vertical rectangle. Once the simple drawing is complete, collage it with cut out colored shapes. This personalizes your work and makes it fun! 

We stayed an extra 30 minutes in class, offering help to those who needed it and adding inspiration to others. We are sure our students will surprise us with their creations!