We started by doing a ‘studio checkin’ and I showed photos to the children of what I had been up to during the week and the messy aftermath in my studio. There was big discussion about who liked tidy spaces and messy ones.

Recapping on the previous weeks, useful and useless objects one the children had found a great example of a useless object; a fork that had been caught in a tornado that had lifted it, spun it around and thrown it into the bark of a tree and rendered it useless. What an amazing an dramatic example !

I showed some examples of objects that had their use removed and we talked about how did we still know what it was ? and what else could it be ? There were lots of ideas about what this cheese grater could be.

This weeks focus was on Material and re-use and I showed some examples of materials and we talked about where they might have come from, i.e. glass is made from sand, paper from trees. We talked about what materials were Man-made or synthetic and  looking at the labels on their school uniforms discovered how materials could be a mixture of manmade and synthetic

The children had brought in a collection of packaging waste and played them out on the tables to make drawings of them. We talked about Contour line drawings and showed some examples.

an example of one of my contour drawings.

The children were initially disappointed that they wouldn’t be using colour but then really liked the style of contour line drawing. One student came up to say  it was the best drawing they had ever done ! We talked about the simplicity of this was of drawing and how you could add blocks of colour later.

Re-use 

After break we looked at a short video of  ‪Marjory the Trash Heap from Fraggle rock, the Muppets. The children hadn’t seen it before and thought it was hilarious.

Marjory the Trash Heap from Fraggle rock, the Muppets

marjory as a contour line drawing with colour.

I Introduced the word  Animism-  the belief that objects have feelings, thoughts and qualities of living things.They thought of a long list of names of films that brought objects to life. Soon we realized that we what animism was.

Making a ‘Material Pet ‘

As a group project the aim was to make a large trash sculpture a ‘Material pet’ that will live in their classroom. Carefully Joining their collected waste together, using tape to attach the material together the class went about making body parts out of their scrap material.

The children come regularly up to the screen now and show me what they are working on and give me an update if they’re doing group work.  Sometimes its so hard to hear and the image gets a bit pixelated when there’s movement so at times I’m worried my feedback is a bit delayed.

By 12 O’Clock the class were still busy making and will continue making it . Then name the ‘Material Pet’ and decide what kind of character it had. Im really looking forward to being introduced next week !

I then got a message from Miss Byrne with a photo of the Pets feet with roller skates ! a kindred spirit !