Residency 2-Minneapolis Institute of Art-Angela Olson and Natalia Choi (2.5hrs)
This week at Mia’s Toddler Tuesday’s I worked with Laura Wennstrom again. Like the previous week, she had set up multiple workstations for the day. This week we had five stations; free drawing, paper collage, painting on foil paper, crumpled paper painting, and working with stickers. This session definitely felt more structured and better organized than last week. This week each of the children were able to spend more time with one setup, as each activity was slower paced, and there were less students in total.
Given that there were less kids, I was able to interact with them more, and even sit down with them and guide them through an activity, or make an example along with them to show them possible options. As this class has kids attending who range from ages 2-6 years, they all have different skills developed and different attention spans. It is typical that some end up doing a variation of the activity. Laura clearly outlines in the beginning of the class, that this is totally acceptable. That said, by being able to sit by them individually and give them a little extra attention, sometimes they are willing to try a new way, and they’ll end up enjoying it. This happened with a couple of the children in this week's class, and this was really exciting for me.