June Family Focus: Creativity

As I hope you saw a few weeks ago when I published the booklist, our Family Focus Trait for June is creativity! We officially wrapped up honesty and kicked off creativity on June 1 with a yummy family dinner and family meeting (because, by now, you all know that in our house, family meetings are much more successful when everyone’s tummies are satisfied and their hearts are happy!). For our creativity kickoff, I chose to read Windblown by Édouard Manceau, which led into a corresponding process art activity that we all thoroughly enjoyed. Read on to hear about the book and get some information about the process art!

Though the storyline is simple, Windblown’s illustrations inspire great creativity and lend perfectly to a group process art project! Windblown is the story of shapes, simple shapes of different colors and sizes. As the story begins, the shapes are just lying around, and community is wondering what they are and who they belong to. One by one, Manceau uses the same set of shapes to make different animals, each claiming that the shape belongs to him.

“They’re mine!” said the chicken. “I saw them lying around!”

This continues on until the wind comes and quiets the voices, declaring with finality that she’s the one who created the shapes and blew them here. Indeed, she’s going to continue to blow and blow and blow the shapes until they fly high in the air and are found by the reader, who receives a challenge from the wind:

“They’re yours now, too. What will you do?”

So what art did we do? We rose to the challenge, of course! We each had a set of construction paper shapes based on the shapes in Manceau’s Windblown, and we spent time building, deconstructing, and creating anew. In the end, we each picked our favorite creation, glued it down, and displayed our art proudly on our refrigerator. These masterpieces will live here over the course of the month, reminding us every day of the creativity we all have inside, and of the value of the inherent differences in each.