Key post 1

End of week 2 / March 21st

I have discovered that working with primary school children is really fulfilling, and that it's something that I wold like to pursue further within my practice. I have learnt that working with children is a lot more complex than I imagined because each child is different in different ways. I have also discovered how to think in more detail about how to present and teach a workshop, and it was a lot harder than I thought it would be because of adapting it to various ages and abilities, and understanding my aims and objectives for the workshop. (LO2)

I think that nature has played a large part in my ideas because it was present in the work I did with Northenden primary school and with the workshop making and I think that it's a really strong subject to work around. With the theme of window boxes, there are loads of different ways to tie it in with different situations, such as in Northenden we created a forest/natural themes wall mural, and with the workshop making we decided to think about the natural shapes of a beehive and incorporating as many natural aspects into the work as possible. The theme of nature is a really good idea for working with children because they know about it because it's all around us, and the children are automatically interested. (LO3)

With our workshop making, I think that we struggled as a group to think of something in a short space of time and create it using limited materials. We loved our theme of keeping it as natural as possible and thought that the beehive shaped window box would be a more creative alternative to a standard window box. We ended up trying lots of different methods to try and create the shape, and get the materials to stick etc and it was near impossible. I found this frustrating because I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve although we couldn't because by the time we had realized that it wouldn't work as a deliverable workshop, we didn't have enough time to create another idea or make a prototype for it. For me this was a frustrating process however I know now that I should open my mind a bit more to other options instead of focusing on one idea only. (LO1)

I intend to explore the natural aspect of the workshops that we have been creating because I think that it's important as part of a window box that it has a natural aspect about it. I want to explore this idea more because I think that there are a lot more possibilities to discover within the theme and its easily adaptable. I have used the natural objects in my work such as leaves, and I've always been interested in natural forms and I've also created work on the human body which ties into the natural aspect of the work. (LO1)

I really enjoyed working at Northenden Primary school because of just interacting with the children and seeing their creative flare at such a young age is really inspiring. I never expected their work to be so good and creative, they really captured the natural theme that we were working from and delivered an exceptional outcome. I also enjoyed the talk that we had from Avril who was an art therapist, I was really interested in the link between art and psychology and how something so simple like drawing could explain so much about a person. I thought that the talk was really inspirational and gave an interesting insight of what an art therapist does and how it can help a lot of people within the community. (LO3)