It’s always very exciting to make a fresh start. Every time we have started a new phase there has been something new and different. We are going to update our journals this morning together as part of the session. It’s an experiment.

Last week I made my first visit to Donaghey for this school year. I met some children from Mrs Wilson’s class who had worked with me last year but the rest of the children were new to the project. It was great to see the familiar faces and to meet all of the new people. I am still learning names. We talked about what an artist does and a lot of the new children had very traditional ideas about that.

I had been finding out from Mrs Wilson what the children had been working on in school and was really interested in the work that they had been doing about life cycles. We thought that we would start this phase by looking at ideas around that theme. We also wanted to experiment with drawing and painting as we hadn’t done much of that the last couple of years. The children are going to add to their journal to tell you more about what we did and then I will add more information later.

We moved on to discussions about things that were alive and how we would know if they were alive. I had brought some objects from home to see if the children thought that they were alive or not. Or if they had ever been. There were some tricky decisions to make as some of the object were difficult to categorise like shells and eucalyptus “buttons” -the amazing little seeds from the gum tree. The class had already talked about lava another day with Mrs Wilson and decided that it wasn’t alive. They said that fire wasn’t alive because it had no DNA. The group suggested things that would signify life -e.g. things that could breathe, breed, that had a pulse. Worryingly, some of the class seemed to have no pulse. Yet they were able to make beautiful paintings and drawings later on. Before that we looked at a tree of life from Egypt that represented different stages of life and a piece of text that talked about life cycles and thought about whether we agreed with what it was describing. There were great words in there like “mewling” and “puking”. We thought about how many cycles there were in a human life and compared it to the piece of writing. The class thought that there were 5 or maybe 6 stages in the human life cycle whereas Shakespeare in this piece had described 7.

With plenty to ponder on we returned to our objects and spent a lot of time enjoying painting them and mixing and using the brush in different ways and experimenting with different kinds of paper, using the brush to lift paint away, using paper towels to lift water for different textures. We also experimented with various papers and with pen and wash. The children responded really well to every challenge offered throughout the day. It was a fantastic start to the project.