THEMES FOR SPRING 2014

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Our Spring 2014 session is underway! Project activities include but are not limited to:

- mini museums
- treasure boats
- telling stories inside forts
- detective work
- postcards from space, and...
- more!

CHRYSALIS TRANSFORMATIONS

Hopefully you are curled up in a nice warm cocoon at home on this (yet another, seriously??) snow day, and on that note, here are a few pictures from our "Chrysalis" project. We used sliding food trays, clay, and other materials to create cocoons that house miraculous metamorphoses: one creature goes in, and after a period, a totally transformed creature comes out! The only requirement was that students invent their own change (e.g. not a caterpillar and a butterfly). We saw sharks turning into donuts, elves turning into rabbits, ice cream cones turning into fish, and one transformation involving a "star-shaped virus with a five o'lock shadow" which I definitely did not see coming.

Elf --> Rabbit

Top: star-shaped virus with five o'clock shadow!

Pretzel --> Pretzel dog

Snail --> Cat

Dinosaur --> horned beetle

Pop!

Related: Radiolab's "Goo and You" segment of their recent "Black Box" episode. I'd always imagined caterpillars slowly changing inside of a cocoon, some parts somehow shrinking while others emerged, but nope! Turns out the caterpillar is totally dissolving into sticky goop before completely rematerializing from said goop. And still their (tiny, instinctive) memories are carried through this process. This information inspired a couple students' stories about the stages of their transformation, which involve the above shark-to-donut goo, and below, a snake dissolving into a sticky goop which "dries and scabs" in the sun (eww) before hatching two revenge-seeking monster snakes with teeth!:

WINTER 2014 STUFF!

We've had a very busy season this Winter (and one riddled with oh so many snow days and make-up classes!), and are already getting started on our Spring session at some schools, too. We're totally backlogged with pictures, and I wanted to post a few phone snaps from the earlier half of the season, including some poem collages, pop-up valentines for the natural world, x-ray specs, and a peek inside an alternate snow globe world. Chrysalis and Hybrid Creature plaster cast photos coming soon to a Make/Believe blog near you!

VALENTINES FOR SHREE JANABAL

Today, in honor of Valentine's Day, the children at Murch Elementary worked with Make/Believe to make valentines for our friends at the Shree Janabal Secondary School in Marpha, in the Mustang District of Nepal. Jessica Kain, the mastermind behind the Marpha Foundation - an artist run organization dedicated to community and the arts - will be delivering these lovely painted hearts (with our best attempt at a few Nepali phrases) to the children at Shree Janabal, with whom she works on some seriously fantastic programming in Marpha. We are really excited to be sending greetings across the ocean, and I am even more excited to tell you that Make/Believe has plans to work on some direct programming with the Marpha Foundation and the students in Marpha this upcoming Fall. More on that another day!

In the meantime, check out all the cool stuff the Shree Janabal kids are already up to here, and more pictures of our District of Columbia --> Mustang District hearts. Happy Valentine's Day!