Art Club: @ Makers Faire

Art Club pupils participated in a Strawbees Challenge at the Makers Faire last week. There were students' prototypes displayed at the perimeters of the booth with some incorporating electronics and recycled materials. I like how the children took initiative to interact with the facilitators whom they are seeing for the first time. This authentic experience of holding a conversation with people beats punching letters on smartphones. They would also need to describe more about their artwork to the judging panel. I'm also very thankful for their parents for making the time and effort to support their children's interest. 

Art Class: Clay Food I

In tandem with International Dot Day, the children painted paper plates to go with their clay food. As a tuning in, I asked the children to draw me the answers to these questions on post-its:

Food is a great conversation starter. There is always food during celebrations. Be it festive seasons, weddings, birthdays, parties, housewarming or vernissage. There is no lack of intagrammable dishes in images to arouse your appetite. In short, people don't just eat when they are hungry. We are also social eaters unless you are looking for what founder, Marina Van Goor, has designed - Eenmaal, a restaurant only for solo diners. 

I've learnt more about the children through the food that best depicts their culture. It was also interesting to find out about their favourite food and snacks which tell me a lot based on their food choices and lifestyles.   

The children responded very well to images - either digital or printouts. We started by looking at our school location on Google Map and found that many restaurants including fast food eateries are strategically situated near our school. We discussed our favourite food, festive foods and food we need to eat in moderation. There was also a lesson where the children manipulate the clay into specific shapes so that they can experience the colour change and describe the difference in 2D and 3D shapes. We observed the shapes, colours and they did a few sketches.

Housekeeping: Drawing on Fabric

The process of preparing children's art installation (on fabric) is mostly very calculated. My colleague and I measured the hallway doors, amount of fabric needed, suitability of the quality of the fabric and even sewing. The colour choice of the thread that will complement the fabric has to considered too. We were in luck when our colleague has a hemming machine and she brought it to school to sew! So we were done in no time. 

Art Class: Exquisite Corpse

The children ended their collaborative artwork of exquisite corpse. This drawing game was invented by the Surrealists in 1920s. Each artist agrees to draw a part of a figure (head, torso & tails/legs) and then put them together in the end to create a bizarre drawing where each part of the figure contrast with each other. I've adapted the game by getting the children to draw on toilet paper tubes with oil pastels and doing watercolour resist. More importantly, they can all do their drawings at the same time and put their artwork together as shown above and manually rotate the artwork to see how the final piece changes each time they turn the images. Hot-glue gun was used to stabilise the final piece.

The children added pom poms to their artwork and chose the sizes of the googly eyes for the teachers to hot-glue them. I used diluted Chinese ink for my first class but realised that it didn't work too well for the oil pastels to show. Eventually, I had to make do with watercolour cake.

The children were introduced to one of the art inquiry approach: Beginning, Middle, End. They observed and drew their 3D artwork on a piece of paper divided into three parts to represent the flow of a story. 

Reading stories written by others from another class