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!"