Week Nine

This was our second week in Heather’s section and it was the Art and Crafts group’s week to present.  We started off class by doing a painting activity with pudding. Each person was given a piece of paper which had an emotion or expression written on it. We were supposed to paint a picture of our emotion with the colored pudding and other objects such as mini marshmallows, raisins, cheerios, and gum drops. The second activity that we did was made putty which could be used for hand therapy. We made the putty by combining glue and starch that had been mixed with water. We also could choose to add a color to our putty by adding one drop of paint. Once we got our putty to the right consistency, we experimented with a few hand therapy motions. The next activity that we did was rock and leaf painting. In this activity we chose a rock that we saw potential to be a type of animal. We were to paint the rock in order for it to look like the animal that we chose. I decided to paint my rock so it looked like a sea lion. In this activity, we also painted a leaf and pressed it onto a white piece of paper so that it left a colorful outline of a leaf. Once the outline was made, you could cut the leaf out in any way that you wanted and glue it to a colored piece of paper and decorate it. The next activity that we did was that we had the choice of making a bracelet or a key chain. I chose to make a keychain so that I could spice up my keys a bit more! It ended up turning out pretty well. The last activity that we did was hand and arm painting. In order to give us inspiration on the creative ways to use hand and arm painting, the group showed us a couple videos on the types of animals and people that had been made before with this activity. I chose to paint my hand white and make a rabbit out of it. It wasn’t perfect, but whatever is!

This week I learned a lot of creative ways that art can be incorporated into a program. I never considered using colored pudding as paint for specific populations that like to put things into their mouths, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. I really thought this activity was a great idea. I also really liked the hand and arm painting activity because it allows members to express themselves and be very creative. I was impressed with a lot of my classmates’ imagination and ability to create some awesome pictures and animals. I also liked that the rock painting activity would be well-suited for at-risk youth as a way to work as a team and to use communication and social skills. I definitely gained a lot of great ideas from this week’s presentation.

This week I learned that I am capable of being creative; whether or not my creativity compares to any of my classmates abilities doesn’t matter. I also learned that I can use these activities as a way to calm myself down or the clients that I am working with. I noticed that I became very calm and relaxed during this week’s activities, which I have never noticed before when doing arts or crafts. I believe I have never felt that way before because I didn’t have an open mind about the variability of creativeness, but would get stressed out because I didn’t think I was creative at all. This week my way of “striving for excellence” was to enjoy myself, have a good time getting to know more of my classmates and their creative sides, and learning new innovative ways of incorporating arts and crafts into programs.