Wildly Creative
About the Teacher
Hello! My name is Kathleen Long-Ferenzi and there are no two things I love more than children and the arts. I feel truly blessed that I am able to combine my two loves as my profession. I cannot express how energized I am to continue imparting my knowledge and love for learning and the arts with you and your child this summer. When it comes to the joy of producing various forms of art, being creative with one’s own learning, thinking abstractly, generating new ideas, and teaching children (as well as learning from them), I can hardly contain myself.
I have attained a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Dominican University in River Forest, IL as well as a Bachelor’s degree in the arts from Columbia College Chicago. I have a wide variety of hands-on teaching experience, as well as a great deal of wisdom, ability, and excitement. My past work experience has included time at an alternative school for children with a primary diagnosis of autism, time at an elementary school, and time at an early childhood education center. I also have just recently moved to Austin, Texas with my husband and could not be happier.
I am very much looking forward to meeting and getting to know both you and your child better through the duration of this course. I have so many educational and fun things planned. I will be including a variety of activities and projects which will challenge your student at an appropriate level and also push them to discover they are even more capable than you and I already know they are! Along with a variety of mediums, I will also be enriching the projects with books, songs, activities, games, discussion, “acting out” and so much more. I can hardly wait to begin!
A note from the teacher & some of the things the campers learned while in camp
Dear Parents and Guardians,
First, and most importantly, I want to thank you for raising such wonderfully responsible and well-rounded children. It was an absolute joy to work with them this past week and even better to get to know each of them as extremely skilled individuals. This particular group of students is one of the most creative and hard-working I have ever instructed. I am always hesitant to dive into the subject matter and mediums too quickly but your children showed me they were ready and willing to learn from the very first moment they took their seats in our classroom. Your children came in every single day bursting with excitement and begging for me to tell them what was next in our busy schedule. In my book, that is a pretty great way to get the day started!
To my delight your children were able to jump headfirst into the “wildly creative” atmosphere and curriculum in which I created for them. They embraced the multitude of mediums ranging from paint, collage, mixed media sculpture, recyclables, crayons, markers, colored pencils, oil pastels, and so much more. Also, they were so excited about particular mediums that I redesigned my lessons to bring back popular favorites or allowed for some free time with mild parameters to experiment more within the medium of their choice.
In addition to the mediums I was very careful to design each of my lessons in order to promote confidence and success in each of the students. Although your children brought a fair amount of background knowledge about animals of all shapes and sizes into the class each day they were able to deepen their understanding through the use of books, stories, working both inside and outside of the classroom, original songs, discussion, videos, images, dancing, sensory puzzles, and even some role play. I always incorporate a varied group of activities in order to appeal multitude of intelligences and interests in my classroom. Quite often I am thrilled to find students grow so interested in a particular subject matter or medium that they want to spend their free time continuing to work either collaboratively or independently. This happened daily in our “wildly creative” classroom.
I always want students to feel good about what they do and take ownership of their creations and learning. It is believed art not only promotes more in-depth problem solving and communication skills, but also is a reflection of who the person is at the moment of creation. I do not complete any portion of their projects for them. Their projects are theirs and theirs alone (except for the occasional break or tear which I am more than happy to help them repair or turn into something even more creative than we originally set out for). Additionally, I firmly believe learning always works well with a heavy dose of fun so you will most certainly find some silly additions in which your child has been creative enough to include.
As you will see in your child’s portfolio, each day I incorporated many of the things we learned into their actual projects to stimulate recall in the students. The projects your child created were not only “beautiful” but were designed to reiterate lesson information about the particular animal we studied. For instance, monkeys most resemble humans as far as feature placement so we dressed them accordingly. On the contrary birds do not share distinct features with humans so we created a full mask to highlight the differences. In our alligator project, we showed how they are able to glide rather undetectably through the water as they swim and hunt for their food. Also, we created hippopotamus that remain submerged up to their eyes and ears for a majority of the day while they are cleaned by fish and eat a diet consisting of mainly plants. In order to help both you and your child recall what was learned you will always find a card attached to your child’s major pieces of artwork highlighting some of the information learned that day. I have found this incredibly beneficial in creating a dialogue between students and their guardians and a wonderful way to review the information that was learned.
Thank you so much for having your child attend “Wildly Creative” art camp at YPW Camps. I know I had a blast and from the looks of their artwork and excitement as they entered the room each day, they did too.
Sincerely,
Kathleen Long-Ferenzi
