After a few technical difficulties getting connected, playing around, uploading and writing on the white board to each other we got started.

One of the great things about this project is how the class get to see inside an artists studio and what they get up to and so each week at the start of each class we do a ‘a studio check in’ where I show the class what I’ve been working on each week. This is really helpful for me to. This being our first day we did a walk about the studio. I really want to get to know the children and their names something I realise might take me a while. So each of the children wrote their names on a piece of paper and came up to stand on the ‘Portal ‘ and also tell me something about themselves. I took a screen grab photo so I would have a record of each student to help get to know their names.

Useful objects

Because our chosen thematic for our first project is ‘What a waste’ I decided to start our project by thinking about the objects and materials that surround us everyday and consider how they got to be in the world. We looked at tools and useful objects that we use each day and talked about their evolution. The hammer and hairbrush were discussed in great detail. We talked about creativity, innovation and inventiveness.

Innovative innovators innovating 

We then did an exercise where the class became creative inventors. We cut out images from an Argos catalogue and put into the ‘Brain Box’ . Each small group then picked two images and went about coming up with a new invention based on combining the images. The idea was to then present it to the rest of the class, showing  a poster for their new product idea much like a Dragons den episode. The class can then ask questions. Some really great ideas came about and the children were really excited about the task. All the ideas and drawings went into their project notebooks. Miss Byrne continued on with this after our session so I didn’t get to see the presentations but heard some amazing ideas.

The idea was to start noticing how things were made, what they were made of , how they were thought of , how they were useful or not in the world and could be continuously re-thought and re-invented.