Today’s session started with an ambitious live journal review session. In this the children reflected on the previous week, what they had heard and seen, what they had done, what they had discovered, what images had stayed in their heads. They had some great answers and Mrs Wilson typed the answers directly into their journals. Words and phrases that I liked were “smudge”, “fish bone” and “nostrils of the blue cow”. While most of the class took their photos and typed their names on the board so that I have everyone’s photograph and don’t leave anybody out during sessions, a small group chose 3 images that represented the previous week’s work. These will also go on the journal.

The children were confident with the whiteboard and could make new pages and take photos fairly rapidly although they did get one of me by mistake. The older children were keeping an eye on the background of the photos to make sure that each photo showed only one person. The typing is a bit fiddly so a few people temporarily rechristened themselves as bg and emmm but it got sorted.

Half of the class then worked with watercolour paints, continuing the experiments with media from the previous week using Bethany’s objects and/or their own thumbs. The other half of the class observed the painters, sketching them with pencils, taking photos and making notes about what they were doing. We stopped and evaluated briefly. Then the two groups swapped round and repeated the activities. This is what the children said about that part of the session:

“Everybody was concentrating.” -Emily

“You could make different colours by mixing.” -Beth

“Bethany was concentrating very hard.” -Leandra

“When you are painting an object that is lighter on one side you can paint the light side first and let it dry and then paint the darker side.” -Sarah

“It’s hard to draw people when they are working.” -Patrick

“Do it slowly because if you do it fast it is more messy and not as tidy.” -Sam

I addressed the idea of messy and tidy. It’s important to get a balance between focussed work and free experimentation. Mrs Wilson and I have been discussing this idea over the past while and figuring out ways to free up the children’s work and stop them from worrying about being perfectionist while keeping the clarity and concentration going. During this dual activity the consensus was that the painting group were concentrating more than the drawing/ observing group. Perhaps at some stage we can figure out why that might be….

After break we changed to a new media for most of the children: charcoal. They decided that they would like to draw live things so some of them drew their own hands or thumbs or the person opposite them or the ear of  the person beside them. At the beginning the new medium distracted them a little bit. They had been experimenting with making different marks and testing out and some of them started to draw without looking so we refocussed on that idea of observation, looking for light and shade and detail within the object. I had explained to the children that I made one drawing the previous week in the amount of time that it took them to  make 4 or 5. I wondered why that might be:

“Because you were taking your time.” -Euan

“Maybe your drawing had more detail.” -Joseph

The children shared some of their work there and then -with paintings we haven’t been able to do that so much as they would run if held up vertically too soon. It was great to get some instant feedback through the photos. The work is really varied -I’m particularly pleased about that. It means that the children are trying things out, taking the initiative and making decisions about their subjects. Mrs Wilson and I had to make extra -detailed plans for this session as the previous week was quite disrupted by poor connections through the whiteboard. I was a bit concerned that it might be too rigid but the added layer of structure and planning did help in this case as there were some points where there was a bit of a delay and because we had made contingencies for those moments, the work was able to flow on without undue disruption.

We have to stop for Christmas now and I really don’t want to. We are just getting going.