Jan 16-22

The event I attended this week was Middle East Story Time on January 19.  Angela Williams presented a book (The Illustrator's Notebook by Egyptian author Mohieddin Ellabbad) that described the life of an illustrator to a group of young children, their guardians and a few of us "miners."  While this story time event was geared more towards engaging children in learning about the middle east, I still found it beneficial for myself.  I was able to observe someone teaching a class, and watch how Angela interacted with the children.  Although I am not studying art education, I feel it's still good to know how to engage learners and how to teach them something specific.  My sister always wants me to teach her how to effectively use her dslr and I found that myself, along with Angela both break down our teaching methods to be specific for a certain audience.  Something else I took away from this event was that not every language is read from left to right and the formation of letters and words are not always the same method the English language uses.  The Arabic way of making/writing letters looks more artistic, beautiful and organic than the letters of the English language that are more block like.  And specifically, some of their designs are formed by drawing random letters - like the dress Angela had on (I forget the proper name of the dress), there were very intricate designs on the fabric that she mentioned were simply just letters (that didn't actually mean anything, their only purpose was to form a design).  I thought that was very interesting, and relatable to myself as an artist and designer.  It reminded me of typography designs where people use letters and words to form an image.  So in that sense, people all over the world use similar methods in making design, even though their languages and cultures might be completely different.  I wouldn't mind attending more of these events to learn more about other areas of the world that I don't typically learn about as an art student.   

Here are some pictures from the event, that was held at the Urbana Free Library.  

These first two are of a sculpture outside the library.

          

 This photo is from inside the library, right before you entered the area this event was held.  The walls leading to the Children's department were covered in a mural. 

A picture of me inside Megan's Reading room... "Reading is a Picnic" 

And finally, a picture Brianne took of Anne and I inside Megan's Reading room... obviously I'm a little more excited about it than she is :)