In my attempt to catch up on the past few weeks, here's what I might have written, had I had the time, a few weeks ago.
Exploration Week at Gann was quite the experience! It came close to what kishroniyah at Camp Ramah is like, but it was way better, way more extensive, and way bigger. I even got to learn a new quilting technique!
There are three tracks of Exploration Week - overnight trips, day trips, and Exploration University. Overnight trips and day trips are fairly self-explanatory. Exploration University, or EU as we call it, is a mini-university. Students pick two courses to take, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. They learn a subject in depth each day. I taught a course on t-shirt quilts - students each brought in a pile of t-shirts and created quilts out of them. Other courses were a class on making hovercrafts, clock making, psychology, water purification, a capella, indoor soccer, and many many more!
Here are some pictures:
This was Naomi (class of '09)'s t-shirt quilt. She is going to college for fashion design, so she already knew how to sew in straight lines! It was quite the impressive quilt. Other students decided not to put batting (ie. the stuffing) inside the quilt, but Naomi wanted to - and her's looks and feels like a warm, cuddly comforter.
This is a quilt, using the new quilting technique that we all learned from Anita R.G., make by Yael. The theme was based on the Hebrew line "Mashiv haruach, u'marid ha'gashem", which praises God for making the wind blow and the rain fall". What is particularly amazing to me about this piece of artwork is that it was designed in many layers. She created the back layer out of dark, grayish fabrics. Then on top of that, she pieced the rain and the grass. Finally, she drew the wind in.
Here's another example of a quilt using the same technique. I also posted this picture here, on the Birkat HaChamah blog.
This is the Grandfather Clock that some of our kids built.
One of our classes learned about water purification, made WAPIs to send to third world countries, and built this oven, in which they cooked corn bread!
These are just a few of the amazing paintings that were produced by our Artist Studio class. I would love to hang the lily pad painting in my apartment!
This is one of the pinatas that were made - and behind it are a number of ceramic pots made in a pottery class.
Lastly, these are some of the very impressive glasses made by our class on glass blowing. I wish I were able to staff that course!
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