To view more of Sophia's art go to

www.sophia-elise.artistwebsites.com/ or

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www.fineartamerica.com/shop/sophia-elise.html


If you see an artwork on this website that you like but it's already sold - please contact Sophia as she does commissions.





Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Free rice for those who need it and increase your vocabulary


Title: Rising Sea
Media: Mixed media with resin
Size: 20cm x 20cm
SOLD
My friend Melissa found this great website today. It's a bit of fun and doing something worthwhile. When you guess the right meaning of words, they donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Programme. http://www.freerice.com/index.php
You can set it to start at level 1 (which I did) and the kids started to play - they felt such a sense of achievement - not only at getting the words right - but at donating 20 grains of rice with each word. Each time they reached 100 there was a mini celebration and they worked together to donate 1000 grains in total tonight.
Was a really good educational experience for them to learn new vocab - to help others less fortunate - and for our family to talk about why people are starving - how we can help - who pays for the rice - how it gets there - how many people it would feed. Actually I have to confess I found it a little addictive myself and ended up donating 6300.
Please give it a go - even a few minutes spent will make a difference - it doesn't cost you anything at all - just time - and we all have bit of time that we can spare to help others less fortunate - and of course - you may even enjoy yourself and learn some new words in the process :-)
I choose this painting to go with this post because a year ago when I did it I used rice as the texture. Now, I feel mortified that I actually used rice in this painting. I'm looking at it thinking - how many people could that have fed? Here is a necessity of life I used without second thought to create a luxury item - art. Therefore all money from the sale of this piece will be donated to charity

2 comments:

Kay said...

I taught in a low-decile school where it was policy not to use foodstuffs in art-making. That has stayed with me, and I still can't enjoy art, even that innocently made by children, if it has a food content.

Sometimes it is the little things that really make you think!

Sophia Elise said...

I feel really embarrassed about it now ... at the time I was thinking back to preschool where we used macaroni to make necklaces for our mums and paintings too ... I think it's a very important policy to have and I hope that all schools and preschools have adopted it now ... there is no need to use food to create ...