Together painting on the Square

All year we have been making Together Paintings... working together, painting together, creating together - learning to collaborate, learning to listen to each other and learning to appreciate each others abilities and to learn from them...

If you are new to my blog you won't know about our project... "Together on the Square" where we are focussing our attention on the public space right outside the preschool. The children have been learning about design, they have been learning about their own wants and wishes, and those of their peers... we have also been asking those living in the sheltered housing /retirement home what they would like to see on the square... in an aim to design a square for EVERYONE - to be "Together on the square"...

Today we were visited by Karin and Anna who are responsible for the redesign of the area - Anna being the lanscape architect I mentioned last week. We got to share our ideas with them, and they listened enthusiastically to our ideas and wrote them down. It feels so important and so wonderful that the children's opinion are being listened to and given value... this is how it should be! ALL the time... a city that listens to its children... to all of its citizens...

Two of the recurring themes that everyone has mentioned, regardless of age, has been more colour and more flowers/green/nature...

So this afternoon we carried a table out into the middle of the square and started painting flowers ... adding lots of colour...

We used watercolours cakes directly on the paper with brushes and a spray bottle so that the water would stay clean, but also to add an experimental dimension to the whole Together Painting... and it certainly worked as I hoped... there were those children that just sprayed on the cake of paint to get their colour and those that sprayed everywhere and let their colour flow... in the end the spraying became the most important part of the process... so the flowers that had been painted became "rained" on and became blurred as they flowed into each other... the children ran back and forth to the actual flowers growing in the flower displays newly placed in the square - and the fact that they wanted to make purple involved expanding the number of colours available by adding a blue to mix (and to get to hear that wonderful tone of surprise as a child discovers purple for the first time by mixing... a new discovery, a moment of true creativity and learning)...

Before our outdoor art session was over the children started to use their hands and create colourful handprints on the ground...

This was a session where we became a part of the square - people came up to us and talked about how the square needed more colour and how wonderful it was to watch the happy creative children interacting with each other and the paint.

The wind blew a little chilly, despite the glorious sun... and a half an hour was long enough with wet colourful hands before we needed to go inside and warm them up again!

it was actually a good idea to have a little distance between the table and the flowers... the little run back and forth helped keep us warm...

lots of experimenting... it was fabulous watching the colours flow in the puddles that collected here and there due to lots of spray action.

many wishes for a colourful square coming true!