On my fourth day of prac I turned up to the centre armed with art materials for a planned collage experience that would also continue to buid upon the children's castle interest. On this day I also met my third focus child Alannah who is four years and 9 months.
I set up the experience in the art/craft area at one of the tables at around 10.35 am. I used different kinds of paper including: cellophane, foam, coloured paper and shiny silver paper. The paper was cut up in all different shapes and sizes, I also provided children with scissors and uncut paper in case they wanted to cut up their own. I set up the table with four sheets of paper, glue, scissors, the collage peices and I also placed a number of laminated images of castles around the table as a prompt to guide the children's artistic ideas.
Will and Kurtis were the first to sit down at the collage table and started to create artworks using the collage pieces. James and Alannah joined the table too.
Alannah suprised me with how well she took on the experience. Alannah wanted to make a castle just like the one in the picture next to her. I was very intrigued at her patience and precision with putting the glue on each piece and sticking it down exactly where she wanted.
Alannah: "This is a roof"
Alannah: "Bit tricky sometimes"
(Alannah starts putting green at the bottom of her page)
Me: "What are you doing now Alannah?"
Alannah: "It's the grass"
Chelsea, Charlie and Taj joined the table and started discussing the castles on the table.
Chelsea: "Look! Spooky castle"
Taj: "ooo spooky"
Charlie: "What do we do?"
Chelsea: "I'm going to copy the pictures"
Chelsea: "Mines a hard one"
Charlie: "Mines really hard"
The four children including Alannah are working away at their artworks. I found it very interesting to see the different ways the children approached the experience. Charlie was drawing her castle first and then stuck the collage peices in the shapes she had drawn.
Overall I was very pleased with the children's response to this experience. The images I provided worked well in that they facilitated the children without directly telling the children they have to make a certain thing. The children all made a choice of their own and therefore guided their own learning.
Reggio Emilia:
Once again this experience makes up a part of a larger project based on castles, this allows children's interests to be followed up on and it also gives them new ways and ideas to build upon an original interest. The Reggio Emilia approach also beleives in the environment as the third teacher. In this experience the physical environment was set up to facilitate the children's learning using the castle images as prompts or guides to children's creativity, it therefore acted as a third teacher.
Once again this experience makes up a part of a larger project based on castles, this allows children's interests to be followed up on and it also gives them new ways and ideas to build upon an original interest. The Reggio Emilia approach also beleives in the environment as the third teacher. In this experience the physical environment was set up to facilitate the children's learning using the castle images as prompts or guides to children's creativity, it therefore acted as a third teacher.
Excellent set up of the activity including inspiration points from photographs of castles. Did you choose different types of castles to show the children the variety within this type of building? (Just a bit hard to tell from the photos) Always offer different types of inspiration - not just one. The proud look on the child's face and the amount of work in the collages shows how successful this learning experience was. Well done.
ReplyDeleteLea, the images were of different types of castles e.g. medieval castles and some fantasy ones etc. They were all very different from each other, is that what you mean by choosing different types of castles to show the children variety?
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