I am in my studio today working online, so I am connecting with the children virtually. This will be the first virtual session for some of the class, so we have been spending some time discussing that and we have started to take portraits of everyone in the class to get the new children used to the whiteboard controls.

We reflected on our work from the previous session to see what stuck in everyone’s head and we looked at photos from last week. It was a chance for everyone to see other people’s work as last week was so focussed and intense there wasn’t much time to look at what anyone else had been doing.

At breaktime I went out and found some things that were alive. One live thing flew away before I got to photograph it and another steamed up my camera and is now roaring loudly in the background! More of those later. I found some things that I thought were alive and brought them into the studio. When the children were ready we discussed some of the objects from last week and thought about the fossilised coral and what it might be like when it was alive. Someone said it was like bones.

ME: “Are bones alive or dead?”

CHILDREN: “DEAD.”

This is a worrying trend -last week some people had no pulse and this week they have dead bones! We felt our hands to see what was going on inside. Definitely some bones… Investigations continue on that topic.

The children have gone outside to see if they can find anything that is alive. They aren’t allowed to hurt anything so the bugs and spiders are safe for now.

I don’t know what the children found but they are making paintings to show me what they have discovered on their explorations. People have been taking photos throughout the day so I am hoping to see more of what they chose and how they represented it. They had a choice of media -pen and wash, oil pastel or paint. This week most of them chose watercolour and a few did pen and wash. We talked about the delicacy of watercolour paint. The children thought that delicate might mean “easily broken”  and one of them said  it meant “fine”. I think that’s a lovely definition, especially in relation to watercolour. The time flew in so quickly. They were so focussed and the new children were so quick to adapt to the new way of working. One said at the end that it was a bit strange:

“You’re just painting away and then this voice comes out of nowhere.”

One of the drawbacks of working online is that I have to be very patient and wait until next time to see the work that has been created. As the children were painting I didn’t want them to walk about and make the watery paint run down the page. Roll on next week.