Alien Visit

The visit to the school was very successful, all 29 pupils present created AMAZING aliens in the workshop. They were all very excited to be working with us and enthusiastic to stay on task. We split the class into smaller groups and we all took our own table, or on bigger tables there were two of us working with smaller groups. I had a lovely group of three girls, these were their aliens:

Something intersting to keep note of that was unexpected:

I didnt think about students working at different paces, which now seems really silly to me since working with the children. One of the girls worked very fast, so instead of her staying quiet and sitting doing nothing, I decided to ask the girl to give her alien a name, think about the kinds of things her aliens likes to do, if her alien was friends or enemies with the other aliens on the table, and to make up a short story for her alien.

After doing this, I could hear other children in the class saying similar things with their aliens.

This has taught me to have something prepared for the people who may work faster than others so that they still have something to do once completing the task.

Aliens

Group Discussions

I am impressed with our facebook group. We are using it well to voice ideas and ask questions.

Meet up number 2

We met up this afternoon to sort out our cards for our visit tomorrow.

Using the guillotine we cut out the cards.

We then wrote the category on the back so that we could separate them easily once we arrived at school tomorrow afternoon.

I have taken the cards home with me and will bring them with me tomorrow.

The thing I am most worrying about tomorrow is if the children do not respond well to the stucture (or lack of structure) of the afternoon. Some children may find it difficult to work in this unstructure environment and may lose focus. I do not feel confident that I can handle a situation of rioting children. However the teacher will still be present and she will be able to take over if such a thing happens.

I am also wondering if the children will not like the cards that they pick out from the selection.
Will this mean they will not enjoy the task? Will any refuse to work with the cards they pick?

Only time will tell!

Meet up number 1.

Today we met up and discussed where we are up to so far..

We decided to write out our lists of words to use on our promt cards.

We came up with the following categories:

Legs
Eyes
Arms
Body Shapes
Facial Features

We decided to create 36 cards for each group, as there are around 30 students. We made extra as a kind of safety net incase anything unplanned happened (incase any were ruined, torn etc., incase a child really did protest with a card and wanted to swap)

The lists are as follows:

Legs:

1. Two legs
2. "        "
3. "        "
4. "        "
5. "        "
6. Four Legs
7. "        "
8. "        "
9. "        "
10. "        "
11. Tentacle Legs
12. "        "
13. "        "
14. "        "
15. "        "
16. Bird Legs
17. "        "
18. Duck Feet
19. "        "
20. Horse Legs
21. "        "
22. Human Legs
23. "        "
24. Hairy Spider Legs
25. "        "
26. "        "
27. No Legs
28. "        "
29. "        "
30. Lots and Lots of Legs
31. "        "
32. "        "
33. Dinosaur Legs
34. "        "
35. Choose your own legs
36. "        "

Eyes

1. No eyes
2. "        "
3. "        "
4. "        "
5. "        "
6. "        "
7. One Eye
8. "        "
9. "        "
10. "        "
11. "        "
12. "        "
13. Two Eyes
14. "        "
15. "        "
16. "        "
17. "        "
18. "        "
19. Three Eyes
20. "        "
21. "        "
22. "        "
23. "        "
24. "        "
25. Six Eyes
26. "        "
27. "        "
28. "        "
29. "        "
30. "        "
31. Snail Eyes
32. "        "
33. "        "
34. Cat Eyes
35. "        "
36. "        "

Arms

1.  Two Human Arms
2. "        "
3. "        "
4. "        "
5. "        "
6. No Arms
7. "        "
8. "        "
9. "        "
10. "        "
11. Crap Claws
12. "        "
13. "        "
14. Monster Arms
15. "        "
16. "        "
17. "        "
18. Really Long Arms
19. "        "
20. "        "
21. Short Arms
22. "        "
23. "        "
24. Tentacle Arms
25. "        "
26. "        "
27. "        "
28. "        "
29. Four Arms
30. "         "
31. "         "
32. "         "
33. Six Arms
34. "        "
35. "        "
36. "        "

Body Shapes

1. Create your own body shape
2. "        "
3. "        "
4. "        "
5. "        "
6. "        "
7. "        "
8. "        "
9. "        "
10. Sausage Shape (drawn onto card)
11. "        "
12. "        "
13. "        "
14. "        "
15. Splodge Shape (longways) (drawn onto card)
16. "        "
17. "        "
18. "        "
19. "        "
20. Pear Shape (drawn onto card)
21. "        "
22. "        "
23. "        "
24. "        "
25. Sausage Shape (sideways) (drawn onto card)
26. "        "
27. "        "
28. "        "
29. "        "
30. Figure of eight shape (drawn onto card)
31. "        "
32. "        "
33. "        "
34. "        "
35. Triangle Shape (drawn onto card)
36. "        "

Facial Features

1. Glasses
2. "        "
3. "        "
4. "        "
5. Moustache
6. "        "
7. "        "
8. Big Nose
9. "        "
10. "        "
11. "        "
12. Big Ears
13. "        "
14. "        "
15. "        "
16. Antlers
17. "        "
18. "        "
19. Spots
20. "        "
21. Big Lips
22. "        "
23. Monobrow
24. "        "
25. "        "
26. Horns
27. "        "
28. Big Sharp Teeth
29. "        "
30. "        "
31. Big Tongue
32. "        "
33. "        "
34. Long Hair
35. "        "
36. "        "

We decided to take out "spots" and just duplicated another word we already had.

We the typed this up on Adobe In Design. We used a base sheet of A3, used Arial Bold font (an easy to read, simple font) in black, font size 36pt.

We chose this font as it is easy to read, we are not trying to be condescending towards the children, but keeping the font large and bold is just easier to read.

We drew a grid on the page, and filled in the sections with our words. There were 32 recangular sections on each A3 page.

Once the words were typed up we printed them onto thick cartridge paper, rather than regular paper as the cards would be a bit sturdier.

By this point it was quite late so we all went our separate ways and left our printed sheets safely in one of the lockers in the studio.

Tutorial

Following my hospital appointment last week I had a check up at the doctors today.

Unfortunately, this meant missing the tutorial today.

However I have been informed on what has been discussed:

We will indeed use the theme of Aliens/Outer Space for our interactive playground construction.

We will use our timeslot at the school next Tuesday to have the children design their own aliens.

As we saw while we were at the school last Tuesday, the children tend to copy each other so we have decided to come up with a system to prevent this.

We will produce some flash cards with words on to promt the children how to draw out their aliens. We will create some categories such as "legs", "eyes" etc. and within the catergories words such as "bird legs" and "six eyes".

The cards will be shuffled and picked at random by the children. The aim is that the children use these words to draw from, creating very different aliens from each other.

We will meet up another day to pruced the cards and make decisions of the words that we will use.

Lets Meet Up

The facebook group is priving itself useful as we have been using it as a tool to communicate. Through facebook we have arranged to meet up tomorrow.

Our discussion on the facebook group arranging to meet up:

 

 

Outer Space...

Yesterday, after running our workshops we stayed behind and had a quick chat with Vicky (the teacher) about how we thought the afternoon had gone, the theme and what is going to happen in the upcoming weeks.

We have changed our theme.

We are now going to use "space" as our theme, as we decided it can be a bit more versitile and creative.

Next week we will run a workshop with the children and ask them to design their own alien, we will then use these designs on our actual final outcome. We think that this will be very exciting for the children, and as the finished product will be permanent, the children will enjoy seeing their creations during their future years at the school.

We also had a look around the space, and the possible walls to use:

 

 

 

Day one at Northendon Primary School

Today our group went to Northendon Primary School to run our first workshops with the year 3 class.

We had already planned how we would run the afternoon. Firstly, we would split the class into 6 groups. We would then each take a group, introduce ourselves and briefly discuss what we do at university within 5 minutes, then run a 10 minute art task relevant to our studies.

As I am a textiles student specialising in weave, I decided to simplify weaving right back to the basics, and I showed the children how to do some paper weaving. I did not take any materials with me to use in the workshop as the school had coloured paper and scissors that I could use.


Materials used:

A4 Coloured Paper (5/6 different colours)
Scissors

Method:

Note: Before running the workshop I took a few different colours of paper (around 10 sheets in total) and using a guillotine, I sliced the A4 pieces into 1 inch thick strips.

Fold the paper in half to make it A5 sized.

Cut lines from the fold to the outer edge of the paper, not cutting right to the edge.

Open up the paper

Weave the paper strips through the slices made on your base piece of paper

Note: I encouraged the children to experiement with different colour combinations and to try cutting their own strips of paper into different thicknesses to see how that might work.


Once our 15 minute time slots were over the groups moved around to the next table and we would repeat our workshops. Between ourselves we called the structure of the afternoon "speed dating" although we didn't use this term whilst we were in the class.

One thing that I was surprised about was how capable the children were. I was worried that they would not be interested in paper weaving, and that maybe I would lose their attention whilst talking about myself and my studies. However the children proved me wrong by being very willing to listen and some showed genuine interest, asking me questions and wanting to find out more. They were very quick to grasp what I was telling them to do, and the majority of the class listened intently to my instructions. Some were better than others at the paper weaving, and there were a couple who needed some extra help which is inevitable. I was extremely impressed by the children's positive attitudes towards learning new skills, something that I was not expecting.

Overall the day ran very smoothly, a lot better than I was expecting. I was half expecting the children to take advantage of the fact that they were not taking part in set lessons, maybe by being loud and excitable, or by not following instructions. However, they were all pretty well behaved. The children all seemed to have a great time and at the end of the class they took it in turns to tell the rest of the class what they liked most about the afternoon and the things they enjoyed learning about.

My favourite part of the afternoon was during my last group, as they approached the table one girl said "Ooh YES we have saved the best until last! I've waited all day for this!"

Wall Games

We have been discussing how we will be using the space to create something interactive for the children.

Our ideas have been revolving around using a wall space, and putting something on there, whether we paint it on, or paint onto somehting like a wooden board that we would then place on the wall.

Maybe we will create some kind of wall game, maybe having something painted on that the children can throw balls at, for example, circles that have different point scores on.

I have been looking at different examples of wall games on the internet to expand my knowledge of how this could be done..

 

 

 

 

 

We want the children to have a big input in what we actually produce so during our second visit to the school we will run a workshop with them somehow building ideas and finding out what they want from the space.

 



Planning for our first day at school

Yesterday we had a tutorial with Clare.

We discussed the theme of tropical.

Our first day with the children will be Tuesday 23rd at 12:30 - 15:00

We will introduce ourselves, and run a short workshop of around 10 minutes with small groups on something that will relate to our own practice so the children can see the wide range of paths you can choose in art.

If there is any time left in the afternoon we will sit in the normal activites and see how the children work in normal conditions.

I am a textiles student specialising in weave. I am struggling to think how I can show the children how to weave without it being boring, and without needing a loom...

Watch this space..

Facebook Group

Today in our tutorial we set up a Facebook group.

This is a great way for us to communicate as it lets us see what everyone posts and that way no one will get left out or miss any information.

Tropical Theme

The project proposal is to create an interactive artwork for the playground with the theme of 'Tropical'. You will run workshops in the classroom to find out information from the children about what they hope the artwork to be, and to create designs and artworks to incorporate into the artwork. You will work as a whole group, working with 6 tables of children in the Year 3 classroom, with Vicky the teacher.


The word tropical to me means:

Bright Colours
Exotic Plants
Animals: Parrotts, Monkeys etc.
Sun
Tropical Fish