Equinox and Eclipse art

During my pre-school art lessons in Wimbledon we made light and dark art in honour of today’s twin astroligical phenomena – a solar eclipse and the vernal equinox. As the eclipse was completely, er… eclipsed (!) by a smooth grey blanket of clouds we recreated it using the over projector, projecting a sun on the ceiling and slowly covering then uncovering it with a painting of the moon while the kids lay on their backs to watch what happened. Later we cut out different shapes and arranged them on the OHP to project pictures on the ceiling. Some of the children decided they would recreate the eclipse again for themselves, using lots of little bits of paper to cover the OHP and checking the projection on the ceiling to make sure they’d filled all the gaps.

Meanwhile we made a lot of great eclipse paintings. For this we used huge brushes and foam rollers to cover light yellow paper with dark black paint then etched into the paint to uncover the light paper underneath. We used plastic clay tools to do the etching – they’re such versatile tools, also great for carving bars of soap, etching into wet paint and pressing lines when making mono prints (as well as shaping clay of course).  Here are some photos of it all:

recreating the eclipse

etching with clay tools

writing in wet paint

etching of “the sun”

Superman etching

etching of “Mummy”

a space rocket

Halloween Art Projects in Early Years

At this time of year I always find myself reappraising things, more so than at new year, and it’s usually brought on by conversations and thinking around Halloween and the way traditional festivals are celebrated in childcare settings. At the most basic level, celebrating festivals in the early years is about teaching respect for and developing an awareness of all sorts of traditions and beliefs. So when choosing what festivals we engage with and how, I think it is important to ask: which beliefs and practices do we want to teach the children to understand and respect, and which are unhelpful?

Everybody will have their own value systems on which to base these decisions; I’m inclined to celebrate meaningful religious/social/traditional festivals and ignore the commercial ones. I like to get back to the roots of festivals when thinking of themed art projects. At Halloween for instance I like to plan activities that engage with the changing seasons, the cycles that nature goes through. For many, the ancient festival of Samhain, with which All Hallows coincides, was a recognition of the death element of the cycle of seasons, which is why on All Hallows Eve we remember those we have loved and lost. This week in Eyes Pie Art lessons we’ve been observing how in Autumn the leaves and seeds fall off the trees, then the leaves rot and turn into soil over the winter in which the seeds can grow in the spring. How much more meaningful than talking about how ghosts are spooky and spiders are scary – as if teaching children to be scared is a good thing (one of Halloween’s roots is the use of humour to banish fear of death)!

All this has got me thinking a lot about how the commercialisation of traditional festivals serves to disconnect us from the rhythms of life that they originally recognised. At a time when our whole planet is adjusting (at our peril) to our constant plundering of its resources in pursuit of continually exponential economic growth*, it seems that re-connecting with the cycles and seasons of our world is a far more appropriate activity than encouraging our children to buy into the commercial aspects of Halloween, Christmas and Easter.

So there’s the background to why this Halloween we’ve been making Cy Twombly inspired autumnal art instead of witches hats:

We talked about the colours of the leaves and how we’d seen them falling form the trees and the difference between how the leaves felt – the brown and red ones were mostly crispier than the yellow and green ones in our collection. We used crayons, pencils and sticks to draw into the paint that we spread, paint that was thickened with flour and glue, and stuck leaves in the wet paint. We worked in layers, placing things on-top-of and underneath each other. And just like Cy Twombly, we enjoyed getting painty fingers and making hand prints on our paintings too.

I’m currently thinking up some light themed activities for Christmas/Yule – watch this space.

*more about this in the Astronaut the Cake and Tomorrow by Matt Sisson, which was published in September this year by Searching Finance, and which I illustrated.

Funny Collage

At yesterday’s pre-school art lesson in Kingston we used a variety of 2D and 3D materials, representational images and geometric shapes to make collages inspired by selected works by Dieter Roth, Giuseppe Archimboldo, Nicolas Lampert, and Joan Foncuberta. We used PVA glue and coloured sticky tape to join pieces together and/or stick them down and scissors to change the shapes of our work or different materials – here’s what we came up with [all works by 2-4 year olds]:

on Worksheets in Early Years education…

I don’t like worksheets very much. I agree that they are, generally speaking, not great practice. No Eyes Pie Art lessons ever involve worksheets because I don’t think a worksheet, in and of itself, ever makes for an en excellent early years art activity or learning experience. On first starting work as an art teacher in a nursery I surprised that the previous teacher had given the children worksheets to colour, cut out and glue onto cardboard tubes to make, for instance, an army of identical squirrels. Where’s the creativity I thought? Where’s the attention to the individual needs of the children? And so I climbed quickly onto the NO WORKSHEETS bandwagon.  Similarly I recall a story of my mother’s about my brother’s angst (25 years ago) over a maths worksheet giving simple addition questions followed by a number of pictures to colour in. I suppose the idea was that it was more fun to colour in than write numbers so the children would enjoy maths more. For my brother however – and countless others I’m sure – who knew that 2 + 3 = 5, being forced to spend 2 minutes colouring in 5 apples when they had worked out and could easily have written the answer down in seconds was not a welcome additional objective, particularly as he hates colouring in!

Enough of us work in educational settings where worksheets are frowned upon to understand why they’re bad (if you want more info here’s a great blog on the subject from pre-kpages.com). But as I have observed the children that I teach playing with different art materials in their own ways – identifying the idiosyncratic approaches to their own learning, their schemas, interests and the patterns in their play – my heart has softened toward the much maligned worksheet. Before embarking on my justification of some worksheets I must point out that I still don’t agree with the practices in my opening examples and worksheets on the whole. They indicate lazy planning without recourse to differentiation of learning objectives or any real understanding of the children who were supposed to be doing the learning.

So what makes me think worksheets aren’t all bad? Simply because, when adapted and used sensitively, they can occassionally be very helpful, I’ll give you a couple of examples:
•    In a group of three year olds I observed that during a cutting activity a couple of the children were cutting around pictures that they had drawn. Some of them were cutting art straws into tiny tubes with which they did nothing, while most of them were roughly cutting across pieces of paper and sticking the resulting rectangles together – or not. Recognising that the children were, on the whole, just enjoying the process of cutting I decided to make a couple of worksheets. I drew different wiggly, straight, curved, zig-zag and spiral dotted lines on some A4 paper, drew a pair of scissors at one end and a bee, pirate ship, dinosaur or whatever at the other. The next time the children came for an art lesson these worksheets were added to the cutting resources available. The variety of lines meant that the children could choose how they used the worksheet. They met a range of abilities and provided a challenge that the children were ready for. The learning objectives were process driven – they didn’t have to prove any knowledge, there was no end product to get wrong – just some cutting to be done (which is fun) and no fear of failure.

•    Another group of children were beginning to recognise that they could draw particular shapes to represent particular objects. Some of the children in the group were getting frustrated that they didn’t know how to draw what they had in mind and want adults to draw it for them. I don’t like colouring in sheets so I don’t draw pictures for children to colour in – “if I draw it then it’s my picture and I’ll take it home with me, but if you draw it it’s yours and you can take it home” I tell them. This time, I met them half way. I photocopied multiple sheets with one shape drawn on them – a circle, a trapezium, a diamond, a cross, rectangles with different aspect ratios, ambiguous bowler hat type shapes. Next time the children came to do drawing they had plain paper and shape paper to choose from. They instantly recognised the shapes as particular objects and adapted them appropriately, colouring and augmenting them and adding other details to the scene. And having made the connection between a blank, outlined shape and an object they were more able to conceive of the shapes they needed to use next time they were drawing.

In both instances the staff in the room said “I thought we weren’t allowed to give them worksheets” and I agreed “but these aren’t just worksheets…” I explained. I made these myself in direct response to the interests I had observed in the children’s play and I designed them to teach something particular as they continued to play in their own way. My aim was to enrich the provision for their child-led learning, rather than forcing them to carry out an adult-led activity on a theme that they weren’t at all interested in. I’m convinced that my homemade worksheets got more children cutting with improved accuracy than if I had asked all the children to draw their own lines to cut out – the majority would have just drawn and not wanted to cut up their picture, or just continued to chop with abandon – by bringing a little more focus for those that would choose it.

So should worksheets be banned? Not completely. But neither should they be downloaded willy-nilly from some random early years activities web-site (and I won’t provide mine). I firmly believe that a custom worksheet, thoughtfully designed by an early years educator, in direct response to observations of the children’s play and tailored specifically to those children’s needs, talents and abilities is an excellent addition to a well planned early years art activity or extra resource for enriching child-led free play. Particularly when that worksheet gives the children a choice as to how they use it and, most importantly, isn’t given to the children as an entire activity or distraction that is supposed to just keep them occupied for a while – it is definitely an optional extra.

Sponge painting

I like my sponge painting with really watery paint; it’s a very different experience to regular printing with sponges and poster paints. Watery paint is soaked up more easily by the sponge and has a far more dramatic effect when squeezed out onto paper. It falls from the sponge faster and more freely creating satisfying drips and splatters all over the place. The children have a whale of a time patting the painty puddles and watching/feeling the splashes. I find also that as watery paint runs over the paper more freely it also makes patterns quickly and the colours mix more readily. So recently I revisited the activity with one of my groups of 2-3 year olds – here are some photos (old and new) of this watery paint play in action:

Early Years Art: Hanging Sculptures

Some preschoolers tried out one my favourite Early Years art activities in Wimbledon today – making hanging sculptures. We experimented with different methods but by far the favourite was stuffing tights legs with newspaper, pop-poms, cotton wool, rice and/or feathers to make long, Ernesto Neto inspired forms.  The sculptures were all sorts of shapes and sizes, some were lumpy, some were smooth. There were shorter sculptures and really long stretchy ones filled with rice – when you lifted these ones up and let go they were so heavy they landed on the floor with a thump.

Totem Poles

Yesterday in Southfields, one of my pre-school groups looked at Native (North West Coast) American art. We talked about totem poles and the stories they document before making our own totem pole together out of big boxes and junk modelling supplies. There was also the opportunity to have a go at carving sculptures out of bars of soap, since the Native Americans didn’t construct their totem poles, they carved them out of tree trunks.

This is available as a one off 2-hour workshop from Eyes Pie Arts. Contact matthew@eyespiearts.com for details.

Playing with Clay

In Wimbledon recently, one of my pre-school groups have been playing with clay. We’ve spent the last few weeks experimenting with different ways to change the clay. We added water to the clay with sponges and our hands to shape the sloppy clay into mountains, balls and wiggly worms. We practiced using different tools to make a variety of marks in damp clay and scoop, press and cut it. We used rubber stamps to print letters in the sides of pinch pots. And this week we used the clay along with other natural materials. After a period of freely exploring the possibilities that clay presents the children were able to make an assortment of really quite sophisticated sculptures. Here are a few of my favourites:

We looked at sculptures by some contemporary Aboriginal artists for inspiration before we made these. Other natural materials available in today’s lesson were paints made with mud, sand, clay, charcoal and chalk.

Cave Art

This afternoon I visited one of my regular nurseries in Worcester Park, to make some cave art. The nursery had recently had a delivery of a few items of furniture so when I clocked the big boxes I asked them to save them for me so that I could build a cave in the garden. The cave had three interconnected chambers and two entrance/exits but it was still fairly cramped so a completely new sort of environment for drawing in. Some children curled up and drew on the walls next to them while others stretched out on their backs and drew on the ceiling of the cave. A few of them had torches to help everybody see what they were doing. Some children just enjoyed sitting in an enclosed space for a while. When they had all gone in for their tea and left me with the tidying I crawled through the cave and took a few photos of their drawings; it was like discovering real pre-historic cave art!

Early years art: Fun with pipettes

In this morning’s Eyes Pie Art lesson in Wimbledon some 2 year olds used pipettes to collect, transport and drip a lot of watery yellow paint. I attached a paper ramp to a chair onto which we could drop the paint and watch as it ran down, painting long lines as it went and collecting in a big puddle at the bottom. Some of us really enjoyed watching the paint dribble down the paper, and some of us liked the way it squirted out of the pipette when we gave it a good squeeze. Pipettes are a lot of fun and perfect for many different early years art activities as they also provide great exercise for developing fine motor skills.

The painting that we made was magnificent. It reminded me of this painting of summer by Cy Twombly – maybe we’ll look at some of his work next week: