I’m incredibly excited to be a part of the Lillstreet community as the Resident Artist in the Kidstreet program. While studying art education at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago I focused on how “making” (creating with physical and digital materials) presents opportunities for children to become producers rather than consumers. This research made me eager to participate in a community, like Lill Street, that values “making” as an important developmental pursuit. Through “making,” children elevate their ability to act as stewards of a sustainable world.

As Melanie mentioned in her last post, my daughter Cora has been testing projects as I develop them for classes here at Lill Street. One of her favorites so far was made by drizzling chocolate syrup on a piece of plexiglass. She scanned it, altered it in Photoshop, and then used that image to create several different variations.



Simple materials and time to play...

Open House Fun

We had a great time with all the families that came to our open house yesterda! Gabriella took some wonderful photos of some of the wonderful creations:


At Kidstreet, we love the opportunity to come up with creative uses for materials destined for the landfill, as demonstrated by these wonderful hand puppets made from CD mailers.

For those of you who missed the open house, you are always welcome to drop by during our open hours and tour the building- there are many artist studios, classrooms, the gallery, and delicious food and drink at the First Slice cafe. Saturday mornings we also have a drop in family class from 10:30-11:30 and it is recommended that you pre-register by calling the front desk at 773.769.4226 or signing up on-line.

Our Spring class session begins the week of March 28th and many classes still have available openings. View the schedule online here. We are very excited to have our new Artist-in-Residence, Kimberly Pancoast, who is introducing a technology based class this Spring as well as a few camps this summer. She is busy experimenting with scanners and transferring images to various materials. I can't wait to see what the kids do with this new tool!

I have so enjoyed getting to know Kimberly and her creative (and sometimes guinea pig for new projects) daughter Cora. One of my favorite conversations was about how our kids loved the simplest things. For example, I brought home a plant that was sitting on top of small pebbles and my son could not get enough of playing with them. Kimberly had the same experience with her daughter who loved playing with dried beans and had a huge container of them she continued to use even as she became older. So much creativity with such humble materials. Kids are so amazing.

Have a wonderful day everyone!

Melanie

Fall and Winter Upcoming Events

Hello everyone,
We hope everyone is having a cheerful and healthy autumn. It has been a busy Fall term, and we are into our second week of our second session. It's too late to join most of our weekly classes, but we do have our weekly Family Drop-In and Workshops if you are looking for a weekend activity the entire family can do together, and School's Out camps for the Veteran's Day holiday.

We have begun offering classes for teens on Friday nights from 7-9pm. I am very pleased that we have a large group of young adults learning to make their own comic books from Andrew Campbell. We look forward to seeing some of their work and hope to post some soon. We will continue to offer multiple classes on Friday nights for teens. We are excited to provide a place for creative young adults have a place to connect with each other and exchange ideas and develop friendships.

We have begun registration for our Early Winter mini-term, which runs from Nov. 29th through the week of Dec. 13th. There are weekly classes for all ages, family workshops, and school's out camps to accommodate busy holiday schedules. There are some exciting winter-themed classes and workshops offered:

Print and Paint with your toddler to create one-of-a-kind gift wrap and cards!
Your 5-8 year old can make a ceramic snow village that will light up!
Come as a family and make Ornaments or Menorahs at one of our Family Workshops.
You can see the complete listing for classes here: Lillstreet.com

Looking to get into the holiday spirit? Come to our Open House from 12-5pm on Dec. 4th and walk through our gallery and artists studios, take one of our free workshops for children and adults, and maybe even pick up a special hand made gift from a local artist.

We hope to see you soon!

Melanie and the Kidstreet Staff

All Things Messy!!

Kids got a little crazy with paint, clay, and plaster in the All Things Messy camp at Lillstreet earlier in June. We had a ton of fun experimenting with baking soda and vinegar, shaving cream, and finger painting. At the end of the week we had a body paint parade with the plaster puppets we made!!

Exciting creations from the young designers of Lillstreet!

The first session of Lillstreet Chic has ended.In one short week we learned the basics of fashion illustration and pattern-making, and made bags, bracelets, skirts and screen-prints. It was a lot to get through, but with such dedicated and creative students the results were impressive! Lillstreet Chic runs again in August, so there's still plenty of time to sign up!

CAMP!

Hello everyone! I hope you have all been at the beach making sandcastles or riding your bicycles in the wonderful sunshine. Summer's here! School is not out for all of us, but this Memorial Day weekend starts what I think will be an amazing Summer.
Camps start next week! Get very excited :)
And it's not too late to register for camp! So if you are thinking of signing up for a summer camp, call or stop into Lillstreet sometime soon and sign up! It's going to be a wonderful and creative summer. We are building new cabinets in our classrooms to make it easier to navigate and fit more materials to make more and more beautiful things!
Hope everyone is keeping cool!
Alyson

In full swing!

Things have been going great here at Kidstreet. We are getting ready for our summer camps, starting the week of June 7th. So if you are thinking of signing up, come on in because the camps are filling up fast!
We've been having a great time so far, making beautiful things, and can't wait for the summer!
Our second 5-week Spring session started this week, and I'm really excited to see what everybody makes :)