Category: Course #5

Art 1: Writing/drawing own story

In this session we stimulated our storytelling and writing skills along with drawing and illustrating. We took advantage of our opportunity to host Sacha, a visiting art teacher from the US, who helped some children to build their stories in English. The children chose 3–4 objects from the collection I had prepared for them. The objects of their choice, whether funny, playful, bizarre, ordinary or very special, became the characters in their story. After writing a short story they went on to draw the objects that represented their main characters. Some children chose to do a single illustration, while others were more attracted to making a storyboard.

Dance 4: Hands and Feet

Hands and feet are our extremities, they connect us with the outside world, with the ground and the air around us and with other people. We give and we receive with them all the time and we use them constantly every day, when eating, walking, writing, running, drawing, jumping, etc.
There was a little anatomy work, a warm-up and a dance based on this theme. Simple interactions became more complex, experimental and playful.
There were lots of nice moments during this class. At the end, the kids were free to choose how to  draw the impressions of the class.

Art 3: Expressive flowers

We worked together with the artist and painter Barbara Rink. She set a couple of goals for the children to focus on:
— Painting directly without sketching lines.
— Observing the background of a still-life and how to translate that onto the paper. The kids were encouraged to work in a different order than they would normally do: starting with the background and only painting the flowers at the end. They looked at shapes around the vase, negative shapes, colours and patterns.
— Using all colours except for black. Every artist has his or her unique style 🙂