Essential Questions

The Chicago Children’s museum opened back up again this summer and I started volunteering again this Fall. It is now open Friday through Sundays and the Young Artist Program that ran Monday through Thursday mornings is no longer happening. So I have been volunteering on Friday mornings and learning the workshop format.

For the first few months that the museum was open visitors created a garden collage. In addition to an explanation of the techniques to be used the workshop introduction includes an essential question. For the garden project it was, “What makes a garden interesting?”

I hadn’t heard of the concept of essential questions before so was glad to find this posted slide.

When I started volunteering the project was making finger puppets and the essential question was “What makes a good puppet friend?”

“How is using a paintbrush different than using a pencil?” was the essential question for the painting project that followed. “A pencil already has the color in it.” was my favorite answer.

Stampaganza! was the latest project and the essential question was “How can you make a picture using rubber stamps?” The educators suggested using the stamps – in a different way than they were intended – to create a picture. Since we often ran with an open studio rather than a workshop format, examples were displayed on a large clipboard that could be brought to the table.

Next up: Big changes to the art studio!