Workshops
Science
The Children's CreativeEdCamp's Science Workshop is a hands-on, minds-on workshop that promotes learning through discovery. The guiding principles of the workshop are:
- Children need to be given freedom to develop their own path of inquiry
- Physical activity and the satisfaction of exploring, designing, and building things makes science more productive and fun
- Ignoring traditional boundaries between physical and biological sciences enables children to discover the synergy between the sciences
- Science Workshop is to provide children with opportunities to take part in facilitated and self-initiated science projects.
- The Science Workshop occupies a 2,500 square foot space. This space is filled with workbenches, a variety of saws, drills and sanders, plants, books, and projects in various stages of completion.
- This space is filled with workbenches, a variety of saws, drills and sanders, plants, books, and projects in Children can utilize the exhibit space to examine and play with a variety of items as well as view projects developed by other children to help them find a path of exploration to pursue.
- Children can tinker in the workshop area, where they learn to apply problem-solving, planning, and inquiry skills as they develop and explore their own self-initiated projects various stages of completion
Painting
Painters use a number of materials to produce the effects they desire. These include the materials of the surface, or ground; the pigments employed; the binder, or medium, in which the color is mixed; and its diluting agent. Among the various media used by artists are fresco, watercolor, oil, distemper, gouache, tempera, and encaustic. In addition to these, painting properly embraces many other techniques ordinarily associated with drawing, a term that is often used to refer to the linear aspects of the same art.
If painting and drawing are not always clearly distinguishable from each other, both are to be distinguished from the print or work of graphic art, in which the design is not produced directly but is transferred from another surface to that which it decorates. While the print may be one of many identical works, the painting or drawing is always unique. Painting has been freely combined with many other arts, including sculpture, architecture, and, in the modern era, photography
Decorative Arts
The distinction between the fine arts and the "decorative" is mostly arbitrary. Today the distinction is a familiar one, if not a clear one. The decorative arts are viewed as more craft based, serving or alluding to a function. While the categories of decorative arts are vast, fine craftsmanship seems to be the single unifier. Craftsmanship is more than technical virtuosity. It demands a profound understanding of materials and of the tools with which those materials are fashioned.
Music
Learning through music is extremely effective because music drives deep into the brain, including some of our most primitive areas, connects widely among our various learning centers, and is easily stored and is easily recalled. Because of this, huge amounts of information, both intellectual and emotional, can be processed, stored and recalled by the brain when acquired through music. Music has been shown to stimulate brain function. The brain is quick to focus on it. Music automatically touches three of the four modalities by which the brain processes information. It is auditory, kinesthetic/tactile (movement), and tactual (elicits emotion). When the lyrics are made available in the printed form, music also taps the visual modality. Rhyming and rhythmic input taps into other areas of the brain. Music is perhaps the best medium to store content with an "emotional charge" that can be brought back long after the lesson is over. Songs, poems, rhymes, and raps thus become effective vehicles for long term and cumulative learning. Because of its well known impact on one's sense of well-being and other feelings, it is a strong medium for spiritual formation and expression.