Over the past few weeks Basin Arts has had the pleasure of hosting a few field trips, and they starting to become something of a high demand among the elementary grade schools! Ben Koch, one of our artists in residence, shares his experience of the first ever Basin Arts field trip and gives a brief description of what took place throughout the event.

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The Truman Field Trip to Basin Arts was an incredible opportunity that I will never forget. It was my first time teaching Pre-K, and they have by far been the most fun group of children! The students were so excited to be at Basin and I believe they left with an overall  amazing Art experience.

The lesson began with introducing the different parts of the human body along with the different parts of the violin. Students then explored the five senses through movement and live music. Once they discovered their senses, we discussed how the senses can overlap with each other like how you can both smell and taste food. Students then were put into groups and were taught how to collage by creating positive, negative spaces and overlapping images. Images were found from magazines that consisted of facial features, body parts, food, words, animals and musical instruments. Each student picked a couple of images and placed them onto their group’s paper using glue sticks. Once the groups finished their collage, they displayed them on the wall. Each group had to look at their artworks and create a movement inspired by an image in their collage. As a whole, the students created a dance from each group movement.

I chose collage because I personally love the medium. I enjoy cutting out images and saving them for opportunities like this. Collage is inexpensive and I believe kids at a young age respond well to photographic images. Collage is hands on and you have many options of images to choose from.

I noticed that the students were drawn to images of food more than anything else. A lot of the dance moves they created were inspired by food too.

The students interpreted the images very well with their dance movement. It was fast and fun to collage, but to sit and look at what they made and have to come up with a dance is were the magic happened.

What made the Field Trip so special for me was seeing the kids work together to create a dance inspired by collages that they made. It was so fun! Also, the participation from the Truman teachers and the family members made it even better. I’m lucky to have taught such wonderful students.

~Ben Koch