Skye's Visual Aides Speech- An Art Project

In an attempt to avoid a Blogjam,(a pile up of blogworthy events and notes yet to be written and posted), the next several blogs may not appear in the order that they occurred, please bear with me. Believe me, it'll be confusing for me as well as I use my blog as a way to keep track of what is happening and what has happened. With my memory being what it is, I am often wondering, "Where in the World is Jon".

Skye's Speech

As part of Skye's home school experience, she is part of a Home School Public Speaking Club that meets once a week. It is mostly child-led, but has a wonderful framework patterned after Toastmaster's International and the dedicated guiding hand of a home school mom who organized and founded of the group, and continues to do an amazing job keeping it going. It has trully enriched Skye's learning experienced and inspired me to start an ecology class(more on that latter, blogjam alert).

The members of the group are assigned various roles in order to run the meetings, do importu speeches, evaluate one another, and give speeches of varying lengths and subjects. This week Skye was to present her "Using Visual Aids Speech" about her being a member of the HighPointer Club of America and the HighPoints we conquered on our road trip several months back.

I just figured out how to connect my computer to the projector in our TV room and thought it would be cool to make foam-core cut-outs of each of the states where we bagged a summit and mount the photos of the journey on said cut-outs.



I would find a picture of the state on the internet and then size it up to the piece of foam core I had.





Then I would trace the outline on the foam core and then take it down and cut it out.




The first couple were fun and then it became a race against time because as usual we waited until the last minute to motivate get things going.

We had several boards that had been used and re-used and were ready to be retired, so I figured we could re purpose these one final time.



We mounted a map of the US to show our journey and where the high points were. Above the map is the official HighPointer poster which gives all of the 50 state's summits, their names and elevations.



A work in progress.

While I worked on the pieces, Skye worked on the speech, did chores, like laundry and even cooked up a spaghetti dinner for us. It was a good team effort.



More pieces to the puzzle as it were.



Project from another angle. Trash can in background is part of the Ecology 101 class, blogjam ahead.

As I write this at 6 am, with the speech to happen at 10 am, I still have to run out to Staples for a proper eisel, I now know of the closest one that opens at 7 am, blogjam alert.

Finish a couple of the states, for some reason the brown paint didn't dry as fast as the others.

Practice and hone down the speech to the appropriate time.

Better get moving......