As you know The Wind (Vinden) group has started the project "Together on the Square", The Sky group (Himlen) has started a Bird project and The Cloud group (Molnet) has started a hand project.
Today three Himlen children came into the atelier with me (with some Vinden children curious to see what was goign on.. and this was also a part of the reason for me doing this... to allow our different projects to inspire each other. in our own projects..)..
As a first atelier experience with me the children got to paint with feathers... I put a bit of emphasis on the fact it was a feather and that feather come from birds... I asked what colour birds were so that we could use bird colours... but they looked with big eyes at the colours and I quickly realised that today was not so much about keeping everything birdlike, but to allow them to explore paint and colours with a feather...
They started with one colour and I soon added another colour (of their choice) so that they could mix the colours to create new ones... then as the paint started to disapear i asked if they would like a new colour...
The Vinden children watched, some kept asking to do things, and I explained that right now I was working with the Himlen children and they were welcome to watch this process or to go and play in the adjacent room... but that I was not clearing space or giving my time to them, and that they would have both time and space after snack which was just 20 minutes away... They accepted this after three times of trying to demand that I give my time to them... I think they found it unusual that I was not "theirs". They did watch and when two of the Himlen children finished they were able to use up the left over paint to experience feather painting themselves...
One child kept painting for five to ten minutes after snack had started. "Snack has started, would you like to go and eat snack now?" "No, I am not finished yet" It was during this time that she experimented with how much paint a feather could scoop up and drop onto the paper before spreading it out... And then she was satisfied and we washed hands and she went off to snack as i started to prepapre white circles so the the Vinden children could make snowflakes as they had requested earlier...
Hi Suzanne, you mention working with several groups of children on different projects. How do you manage your time throughout the week in the studio?
ReplyDeletethis was an afternoon experiment to see if this was possible... it became far too tricky to "do projects" like this in the afternoon with a different group each day... these days instead I have a free flow of children coming into the studio and I make materials available that will encourage a deepening of the projects they are involved in during the mornings... this means constant dialogue with the other group teachers so that I know what projects are going on in the other two groups...
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