Friday, April 8, 2011

Spring Break 2011

This year, the Cook Arts Center and the Cook Library Center joined forces over spring break! Participants from both facilities got to do art activities and plenty of reading together, along with learning how to read maps and get from place to place using public transportation.

On day one of our spring break mini-camp, students ventured downtown to Central Station to view the amazing public art, learn how to read a bus schedule and get an inside peek at how security keeps the station running smoothly. We returned to the Cook Arts Center with fresh ideas after viewing the mosaics and murals, and students created inspired collages on small boxes to be used for traveling kits.



On Tuesday, with fresh knowledge about The Rapid and how it works, students from the Cook Arts Center walked to the Cook Library Center, taking notes along the way on the number of bus stops and how frequently the buses passed by. After arriving, students began work on creating their own hand-bound journals out of recycled envelopes and cardboard. Students learned how to do a simple stitch to sew the bindings of their books. The next day, students from the Cook Library Center paid a visit to the Cook Arts Center, where everyone was able to create the covers for their journals and creatively personalize them. Students made pockets and bookmarks that beautifully accented the journals they had made from scratch!




Participants also got their creative juices flowing in order to help out with our annual Día del Sol fundraiser. To help promote the event, they created as many different suns as they could out of many different mediums including wood, paper, pastels, crayons, yarn, foam, beads and paint. It was great to see how many different ways a sun could be created!



On our final day of mini-camp, students used their newly acquired knowledge of the bus system to take us downtown to the Grand Rapids Main Library and Schuler Books and Music, where we saw more public art, picked out some new books for the Cook Library Center and read, read, read! Hopefully everyone else enjoyed their spring break as much as we did!



Grandville Avenue Arts & Humanities administers the programs of the Cook Arts Center and the Cook Library Center.

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