Up the Creek

The Advance Program Canoe Camp happened again last week. For three days the Advance students paddle their canoes up the Glenelg river. A wonderful time was had by all and although I have a few sore muscles Im sure it was worth it. The weather was a perfect 22 -25 degrees and there was no wind at all, making paddling easy. A bit of a shower (for about 8 hours) tested the tents out on Thursday night and no one seemed to have a leaky tent.
I returned home on Friday night tired but happy, knowing that on Saturday I had the Corangamite Relay for Life to walk. The Relay for Life raises funds for cancer research. Teams are formed, and basically you just walk around an oval (in this case the Leura Oval)…. for 18 hours. It is a huge and well organised event with plenty of fun and frivolity for every one. There is a serious side however and friends and loved ones lost to Cancer and those that survived are remembered all the way through. A solemn candle lighting ceremony lit by hundreds of lanterns is a fitting tribute to those people. Over 1500 people were signed up in teams and over 89,000 dollars was raised on this occasion.

One of our Year 10 students recently had the chance to participate in a songwriting workshop, as part of the famous and massive Port Fairy Folk Festival. (www.portfairyfolkfestival.com)
Tom Richardson is performing at Port Fairy for the weekend and spent time developing both the music and the song with our student. I am lucky enough to be sitting in the room next door and the quality of the song and music is FANTASTIC. Our student is performing the song with Tom at the festival, I for one, cant wait to hear it happen in that arena. (Tom’s music is available to download on iTunes)

Last year I made a contact through Twitter to Quinn McDonald (www.raw-art-journals.com) in America. She was kind enough to involve our school Year 7 class in her traveling journal project. Quinn sent us some beautiful, tough and durable paper which was given to the students to decorate and make into a journal page. The pages will be sent back to Quinn and she will then bind them into a journal. This journal will be used to foster a connection to the students in a local school nearby her home. They in turn will be making a journal to send to us. Below is one of the beautiful pages made by one of my students to be sent to Quinn. How beautiful is it?

Here I am back in the blogosphere after a long time away. This year has been quite nutty and extremely busy with two VCE classes to teach. I am still using Flickr and analogue photography as my main source of artistic expression but this has been quietened down to a trickle. I have a few projects to show you in the next few weeks including the completely awesome Picasso Cows, the fantastic collaboration of journals with year 7 students and Quinn MacDonald in the USA, another photo challenge workshop, as well as the always great year 6 and 7 artworks. Phew. updates with photos to follow in the next few days.

A while back I posted a blog on an art project I was working on with year 9 and 10 students. (The CD scaled fishes)

We finally finished the sculptures and they were hung in the school library. This was a change from the original plan: they were to hang outside the school. The reasons were many and varied including the fragility of the finished work. The most influential factor was that the library had a ready made, empty blue wall, just behind the shelves that was big enough to accomodate the ’school’

I think they look great in their new ‘pond’ surroundings.