Regent Park Focus

Week Two of the Photography Summer Program: In week two of the summer program we worked with K-club (ages 11 and up), SEAS (ages 15-17) and Girls group (ages 9-14.) In the girls group we started by introducing each other and talking about the final project we would be working towards. As a group we looked at some photography projects relating to the woman's body image. The girls brainstormed some ideas for final projects of their own and eventually settled on the topic of “Family.” We did an activity outside, shooting specifically focusing on composition and lighting. We then came back inside and took a look at some of the photos the girls had taken and talked about each of them in relation to lighting and composition. We related this activity back to the importance of goal setting. With SEAS and K-club, we started week two by sharing some of the project ideas they had thought of over the weekend and we talked about what the purpose of documentary photography is. We contin...

In week one of the summer program we met with the K-club (ages 11 and up) and SEAS Youth (ages 15-17) who would be participating in the photography workshop for the next 7 weeks. We did introductions and learned about their knowledge and experience with photography. We then introduced the course and discussed the final project we would be working towards. We talked about what different kinds of photography there are and learned more specifically about photojournalism and documentary photography. We looked at some news pages on the net and talked about what kind of still images you see in the news. Each youth was assigned to go onto flikr.com and look through some photos, picking their favourites and showing the rest of the group. We then looked through everyone’s choices and talked about what we liked about each of them. As a group we looked through some multimedia projects, photo essays and slideshows on mediastorm.org and a couple other internet sites. The youth looked through some N...

In the first week of summer programming we had some youths from K-club in the studio learning how to make beats by using software called Reason. The youths were shown some basic steps in making an instrumental beat, time structure/count and how to use different devices for various sounds. The following week we had both youths from SEAS and from K-club becoming more familiar with making beats or tracks using the software while experimenting with the keyboards. We also have been integrating some discussions around life skills (decision making, team building, goal setting, ethics and collaboration). This week the youths are continuing to work on their beats in order to complete their tracks as a final project for the summer program. Some youth have been working on lyrics as well, while exploring collaboration possibilities with other youth artists/beat makers. We have been encouraging youth to bring instruments from home in order to record their own music into the beat making software, th...

This past week the girls group headed to Guelph for a three day retreat to celebrate the end of this year’s program. It rained almost the entire time, but we still managed to have a great time! For many of the girls it was the first time they had been out of the city. They were excited to go canoeing, take part in a scavenger hunt and spend time in the conservation area exploring and drawing in their sketch books. Because of the rain we also came up with lots of creative ways to have fun inside. We painted tote bags, learned to cook lots of delicious food, and put on a “Kids Canadian Idol” show. The girls all said they wished the trip could have been longer and were already planning next year’s trip on the way home.