Whitney Helms' Blog

The Playlist of My Life I was recently thinking about things that inspire me in life. Music is such a big part of my life and because I'm always listening to it, I guess I never truly realized how big of a part it plays in my actual creative decisions and inspiration. I was inspired by Teen Vogue's "The Playlist of My Life" videos ( YouTube playlist link here ) where music artists will share the playlist of their lives. It took me quite a while to condense a playlist down of all my favorite songs, and my final playlist is about 10ish songs longer than the one's YouTube (ooofff)! The vibe of the playlist is certainly all over the place, but I was not making the playlist for the sound, but for the special sentiment it has to me. Each of the songs that I have incorporated on this playlist holds a special place in my heart, and many of them have been in my life for years now.  I have made "all-time favorite" playlists but nothing that has been this condensed...

                   I am combining the topics from the previous week and this week and I am going to talk about a building/place that has brought me a memorable experience along with something that I love about Colorado that inspires me. From the pictures above you may be able to guess that this place in Colorado has been memorable for me as well as a place that has inspired my creativity.      I have lived in Colorado my entire life but it wasn't until late high school that I started going to Larimer Square that often. Larmier Square is known as a historic block located in Denver and it is the city's first designated local historic district. These pictures that I have incorporated within this post were taken late this summer around the time when Larmier Square opened back up due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As you can see, the signs that are hanging above the block say "Welcome back Denver" and "Together starts here." These s...

My major is in Education and Human Development and right now I am specifically studying elementary education. I have always wanted to be a teacher ever since I was a little girl. I would spend hours playing "school" at home with my younger sisters and stuffed animals as my imaginary class. There has really never been anything else that I have ever been interested in doing other than being a teacher. The older I get and the more education that I am being exposed to, the more I have realized that I have truly made the best decision for myself.  What is ironic is that I personally never had the best relationship with education when I was younger. This mainly had to with my separation anxiety that I would get from being away from my mother. I dreaded going to school in pre-school and for most of my years in elementary school. My first-grade year was tough for me yet I will never remember the impact that my teacher made on me; I can still remember the exact clothing she wore on ou...

This week in our Fostering Creativity class we started our group projects! I enjoy working as a team, but only sometimes. I am someone who always likes to work on things way before they are due. However, whenever I am working with a team, I always feel like it takes a little bit longer to complete the tasks or projects because we all work at our own pace. This can be difficult for me and I end doing a lot of the work just because I do not like waiting and I tend to get stressed out! This is definitely something that I need to work on and I want to become better at!  A positive of working in a team for me is getting to hear other's ideas or approaches to certain things. Sometimes I can get stuck on a certain task or project for a while, but when I am collaborating with a team, hearing different perspectives allows me to work more efficiently and it broadens my ideas as well! As of right now, this has been the second group project that I have been assigned since the pandemic of COVID...

The creative person I have chosen to study for my creative individual paper was James Balog. James lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is famously known as a photographer who expresses the relationship between humans and nature within his work. James had previously emphasized endangered animals, old-growth forests, and polar ice within his photography. In 2007 his art took a major shift. James wanted to further combine the insights from art and science to produce an innovative, shocking, and most eye-opening depiction of our changing world. He is passionate about climate change and wanted to express its impacts within his photography. It took him a while to figure out a way he would be able to express climate change within his photography, ultimately deciding that the world's glaciers are the best evidence for the climate's increasing temperature.  As previously mentioned, James set out in 2007 on his best-known project, where he began to study the impact of climate change on the w...

I have always loved Harry Potter. I remember being little and my mom reading the books to me before going to bed. When I was a little bit older, I began reading them on my own. I remember when "The Half-Blood Prince" came out, I literally had my mom and my aunt take me to the theaters to see it close to ten times! Then when the final movie came out I went to the midnight premiere, that will be a night I will never forget!  The First time that I visited the theme park in Orlando, Flordia I was only twelve. I was with my family and I walked in specifically with my mom and aunt. As a twelve-year-old at the time, I was in such shock! It was such a crazy thing for me to be experiencing. Now it has become something that I look forward to visiting each year! Every year since then in the month of October I have gone. Because of COVID this year I will not be going around the time when I usually always go. I was looking over many pictures I have of the Harry Potter World there at Unive...