Last year, the month of May was one crazy ride. We made madalas, we made dreamcatchers, we used salt dough and it very messy and it was lots of fun. Naturally, May 2025 also became the Materials May.
We started with clay. And with portraits.
The language
Actually, the language was not the main priority this time. Just like in our materials lessons last year, the absolute leader in the lesson, the first place, the right of way, all of that was the material, the medium. The language was just something I picked up because we needed it for this particular lesson. This time it was the body parts, especially the parts of the face. We revised them, made up a new chant and played a bit with ‘Tell me about’.
The artist
The artist of the day was not the most important stage, either, but I am very happy with the idea I had for this lesson and how it worked out. Instead of one particular artist, I prepared a whole collection of portraits for all of us to understand how diferent they can be. We looked at them, one by one, and tried to look at what the focus was: the face, the body, the place, the colours or the technique. I was hoping that it would help the children see many various styles in which they could execute their own portraits.
The art
The main idea for the creative part came from Princess Artypants – a face made of clay. I told the kids that they could choose to create a face, any face they wanted, their face or someone else’s, in a style of their choice.
I showed the kids a face I made before the lesson and I outlined the steps (1. clay (form, roll, shape) 2. draw (with sticks and plasticine knives), 3. paint (acrylic paints).
Before the lesson, I prepared the tables and all the resources and I was handing them out and picking them up as we went through the task. I was also making one more piece of mine to better illustrate the instructions.
In terms of the resources we used: a large sheet of paper, fitted with the scotch as the main workplace, a rolling pin to prepare our circles, clay (self-drying, ochra colour), sticks, chopsticks and small plastic knives, paintbrushes and wet tissues, acrylic paints in tubs (everyone got their personal blob of the chosen colours on their A3 piece of paper aka workplace), pieces of cardboard to transfer the faces onto and as their frames.
As can be seen in the photos, we created lots of different types of clay faces and, as usual, it was a joy to see how quickly everyone started to make their own decisions and to develop their own style. One of my students opted for creating the face of a cat, one made an absolutely beautiful abstract Pinocchio. One focused on the colours and one, completely out of the blue, asked for tinfoil because ‘I’ve got an idea, miss Anka!’
To be honest, the idea (for the dress aka the body made out of tinfoil) was so good that I wanted to make my own and this is how his ‘Mona Miss Anka’ was created and how my ‘Angel / Mermaid’ came to be, too.
I really liked the clay as the material because it is extremely flexible and user-friendly. It did require warming it up in the tub of hot water (I did it before the lesson, warmed it up and broke it up into blobs) but later on it was relatively easy to work with it. And it was easy to fix the mistakes in case they occured. We also did not have to wait for it to dry, we started to paint straight away.
It was definitely one of those lessons that finished with me, cleaning up the tables with a huge smile on my face. I loved it.
The pictures that were especially touching include the very basic Pinocchio. It was created by my youngest student and it was the first time this year that he prepared one piece and immediately asked for another piece of clay, to create more. I also love the coloured faced because it was created during a long process of collecting and combining different colours and shades. The outcome is the result of a lot of work and reflection. And, of course, the title piece here, that was a result of experimentation with tools and their opptions and the lovely print that came out of it.
I have already started to think about the adaptations and creating anything in clay, to use it with any EFL topic, fruit, food or animals. Body parts and faces, too, of course! Since it is so easy to create pictures with a stick, I was also thinking of a picture scene, a house, a Christmas tree or a dress. I am already looking forward to it!
One of my student’s design. Created using deepai.org
I decided to share this idea here because I love how this whole idea happened, from just one little Maths exercise into a fully-blown, multi-media, multi-subject project. It is not a story of careless teacher who did not plan the lesson properly, rather a story of a lesson that, suddenly, blossomed and a teacher who saw the full potential.
Step 1 or I only wanted to make Maths a bit more exciting
The year 2 in Maths has been, so far, quite an adventure. Especially after we survived addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and decimals… After those first six heavy duty months of the academic year, the lighthearted Maths came up. I mean, it is still fun, measurements, statistics and geometry, all of that is amazing and we learn a lot but after everything we did before, it is just easy-peasy.
This project happened when we were in the unit of Area and Perimeter and while working on a task from the coursebook ( ) which was pretty easy and straightfoward: ‘to design a garden of the area of 80 m2 and calculate its perimeter’, I realised that my students were really enjoying the task. Truly, madly, deeply. They started to add flowers, trees, huts, colours and some random animals. Maybe it was because while explaining area and perimeter, I drew my own farm and a pig and a chicken…All in all, they got a lot more into it than I expected. There was definitely a lot more potentatial.
That is precisely why for the following lesson I decided to give them a summer hut to design and to draw and to calculate. The main aim here was to follow very specific directions and information and to put together a house in which all the rooms have specific size but they can be of any shape the little architects wanted. It was amazing to see how, again, they got into it but how, at the same time, they already wanted to do more and get more freedom and to add their rooms. Obviously I had to promise that we would design our proper houses when we will have the freedom to do almost whatever we want.
Our project has properly took off in the third lesson. The task my students got was to design a house they wanted: decide which rooms they want to have apart from the main set (the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom and the veranda), make a decision about the area of each of them, to calculate the total area of the house and not have it exceed the allowed area of 200 m2 and use the remaining part of the lot on the garden, the swimming pool or the garage. The main focus here was the Maths and calculations. The follow up task would have to be calculating the perimeter, too.
In order to make the task easier I looked up 200m2 houses with real designs, to understand how big this house can be, how many bedrooms and rooms can be fit in and how it could be organised. The first thing that came up was a lovely website from New Zealand and that is exactly what we used. I printed one of the plans and colour-coded it for the kids to better understand it and we had a look at it during the preparation for the house.
The description and the photo, already in the notebook.
Step 2 Visualisation or ‘Let’s draw it!’
The design could not be done without the floor plan because that is where the real fun starts. I realised it when I was preparing my house plan. Guess what: design is not easy! Putting together all the rooms in some kind of a reasonable shape, the walls adjacent and location of all the rooms…Because I designed my own house, I could prepare the kids better for the task. The following things had to be taken into consideration:
the area of each room and the total maximum area of the house, the calcuations we had to make on the way
the colour-coding of the rooms to make the design clear and easy to understand
the scrap paper to calculate and to draw on not to destroy the actual design
the pencils, the rules and the erasers for all the kids and to tell the students that it might be necessary to fix their desing as you go along because your ideas can change
to allow and encourage the kids to check and to compare their projects and to exchange ideas to inspire each other
to model and to share ideas about the non-standard rooms like the cinema room, the library, the secret room…
This would have already been great because they really got involved in the task and the houses already became precious. And, of course, we met our Maths aims: calculating and measuring. Somehow, during the lesson, we had a student who had already finished and, automatically almost, it turned into a conversation about the house and the student really enjoyed talking about it. I decided on the spot that there must be more lessons and a proper presentation.
The floor plan.
Step 3 or ‘Tell me about it…’
Truth be told, I am kind of lucky because I have four lessons of Maths a week and four lessons of English so that gives me quite a lot of flexibility and freedom. I have the time that I can devote to the projects. On Thursday, our final day of the week, we usually have English and Maths and I decided to use both lessons on finishing the project.
In the first lesson, we were finishing our designs and preparing for the presentation. I told the children that we are going to rehearse in the classroom and then, in a separate classroom, my amazing T.A. will make making short videos of the presentations.
I prepared a template for the kids to use and it was both on the board and on the handout that they took into the recording room (‘Hello! My name is…and I am an architect. This is my house. The area of my house is…The perimeter of my house is… In my house I’ve got…My biggest room is…and my favourite room is… The task was easy / difficult and it was interesting / boring because…Thank you).
My more independent students rehearsed together and I helped out some of my less independent students. Then, my T.A. was taking the students into a quiet room and recording the little videos.
While I was preparing this stage of the lesson, I realised that I needed some grand finale and a reward for all this hard work.
Step 4 or ‘We need a real illustration’
As you can see from the photos, the drawing of the outside of the house was a part of this project as, initially, I wanted the kids to simply create it themselves. However, they got so involved in the design and creating of the floor plan that asking them to draw another picture would be too repetitive. What is more, it is not so easy to draw the house in the time we had left for this lesson and ‘just drawing’ does not lead to any language production. And using the A.I. certainly does!
Now, I know that there are many disadvantages of using A.I. and there has been a lot of talk in the recent weeks of how it abuses the copyright and how environment-unfriendly it is but it is a perfect solution for the young writers and so I decided to use it again in my lessons*).
I explained for the kids that an A.I. engine would create the images of the outside of the house if we prepare detailed descriptions for it. Everyone got a small handout and they had to make more decisions about their design: the location of the house (country, city, etc), the colour of the house, the surroundings, the garden, the fence etc. I took their notes home and typed them up and then brought the pictures to class. We had a lot of fun looking at all the photos and trying to guess which house was whose. Indeed, this worked very, very well.
The serious details.
Instead of a coda
We had a great time with the project and I am very happy with how it turned out
My students drew, calculated, read, wrote and spoke a lot.
We managed to include almost all language skills and at least three different subjects.
The kids had a chance to express themselves creatively and to make independent decisions but also to be the real scientists, to follow instructions and the rules, to be accurate.
It was important to add the last bit, the outside of the house because this was where my students really let themselves be creative. As can be seen in the photographs, the gardens filled with flowers, trees, dugongs, peacocks and dogs and the kids were really specific about the location of their houses, too.
I could not watch the videos being made, I only watched the final product and it was a real pleasure to see the kids speak freely and independently, adding some details and getting into a real conversation. I was really proud of them and, in a way, this project was their end-of-year project and I can say they all learned a lot.
We shared the videos with the parents so I hope it will also help everyone remember this year and the progress we made.
For me, as a teacher, this project will be a memory of how a real, fully-fledged project developed in the making and that the most important thing is to keep my teaching eyes open for new options and for all of the potential that it may hold. Knowing everything from the beginning is not always an advantage. There might always be more that is possible.
The basis for the project were very simple handouts that you can see in the photographs. We kept them all in our portfolios (aka the notebooks). The videos were shared with the parents digitally.
All of the activities described here took a total of 5 lessons. I am not sure if this is everything that a teacher can set aside for a project but I decided to keep everything in and, as always, we adapt to everything that is possible in a specific context and with a specific timetable and a number of hours a week available.
Happy teaching!
*) Do I feel guilty? No, not really. My A.I. footprint is minimal – all my words come right from my brain, I only use the visual creations and very, very rarely. The total of times I have used A.I. for my projects is still under ten. I think I am fine, for now.
This time, I decided to let the topic and the language lead the way in all the lessons this month. On the one hand, it has already proved to be a great way of revising the structures we know (I like, Do you like, adjectives) and, even more importantly, it will help us aling what we know beautifully with our artists and their ideas.
Andy Warhol and the idea for the lesson (that I owe to my friend, just like this whole idea for the series that was born during a conversation) was that instead of focusing on Andy, we focus on food and creating our amazing combinations of it. No suprise then, that the lesson had to include the amazing ‘Broccoli Ice-cream’ from Super Simple Songs and our own version of it, too, which we created with a set of flashcards. The kids were taking turn to pick out two flashcards randomly from the pile and sing a new version of the story (‘Do you like bananas? Do you like sandwiches? Do you like banana sandwiches?’). And the rest of us reacted.
The artist
‘Miss Anka! It’s him!’ It is precisely when the Art teacher smiles, upon hearing a comment like that! The kids were super excited to see Andy again because most of them have already met him, either in our Chebourashka lessons and our Christmas tree lessons or both.
This time, we invited Andy again, to introduce him as an artist and as a copywriter and the art director, too. As usual, I used a presentation (this one here) to show his advertising portfolio and the kids were calling out the products advertised.
We also looked at all the soup cans, read the flavours and chose our favourite one.
The Magic Soup
The art
I showed the children the template of the Campbell soup can (I got mine from Fine Art Coloring Pages Archives · Art Projects for Kids, Thank you!) and explained that everyone can create their own. We made a list of all the decisions to make: flavour, name, logo, colours. This time I did not prepare my own model (I did not have a template available before the lesson, a rookie mistake) but I decided that this time we will have a chance to brainstorm together and that it might also be a source of inspiration for my students. It also so happened that I had my older / smaller group first so I prepared my soup cans with them and when I already ran the second lesson, with my younger / bigger group, I had lots to show to inspire them and it all worked out just fine.
I was really happy because all the kids could accomplish this task and we had a lot of different types of soup posters and our noticeboard looks like a print by Andy.
The Zombie Version of Campbell’s
All the kids worked very well, also the young ones and most of them had a very clear idea of what they wanted to get from the very beginning. The selection of colours took a bit longer but it was also beautiful to see how they were all coming together.
Not to mention that I love all the final products and, again, I could not but keep repeating ‘Oh, that is a lovely idea!’ My students treasured their creations, too! It was one of those lessons when I had to beg to at least get the permission to photograph the posters because so many of my students just snatched their works to take them home as soon as possible. At least I have the photos!
I was planning to ask the kids to make a list of all the ingredients but, somehow, it did not always work out. Next time, I will have to ask the kids to start with the writing, before we get to create properly.
But look at that! We’ve got some magic soup, some tomato soup, some garlic soup, some sun soup, some octopus soup as well as some darkness soup and some zombie soup. I am happy. I hope that Andy would be happy, too! Just look at all these colours!
One of my creationsThe Darkness SoupThe Garlic Soup
This time, I did not teach my regular Art lesson. Last Thursday, in the middle of a regular unit but at the end of the term, with all my kids already tired and looking forward to holidays and with the first properly spring days outside of our windows, I decided to let our hair down and engage into some creative activity as part of our regular English lesson. Yay to great ideas!
The language
This time round Erik Bulatov joined us in our regular English lessons. At the moment, we are in a fanstastic unit ‘Going places’ (Global English, CUP) and we have already revised the transport, learnt some less traditional transport, we did our Big Transport Tournament (choosing the best one, in qualifiers, quarter-, semi- and finals which was basically a lot of speaking) and now we are comparing the transport (‘Are they similar or different?’). We have also worked on the verb ‘to get’ and all its meanings (aka ‘The best verb in the world’).
And then I needed something lighter, more fun and more creative for the last lesson of the term.
The artist
I taught this lesson before, twice, in different ways (the previous posts can be found here and here). I reused the presentation I prepared before even though some of the students have taken part in my Art Explorers lessons already and it worked well.
We talked a little bit about the meaning of words and the meaning of pictures and I introduced the Artist of the Day. We looked at his paintings and the meaning and how Bulatov tried to show his ideas through words and through images.
I have also showed the kids again the images in Portuguese I created for the previous lesson (in the posts mentioned before).
The art
I showed the students the template I prepared, just a simple word TRAVEL in block capital letters and together we brainstormed their own associations with the word. Afterwards, I explained that their task will be to illustrate the word in such a way so as to show the word speak: as a word and as a visual. And that all ideas are good ideas. I gave out the pencils and the markers and they got to work. They were working and I was just supervising and helping with the content as we had to do some research to look for images or for information.
Afterwards we had a short presentation for everyone to see all the ideas (‘This is my poster. I’ve got…because…and…’) and when all of them were done, we also had a feedback session. I wanted to praise everyone together, as a group, apart from all of those individual praises I gave while monitoring and I also wanted to highlight that we had lots and lots of different ideas and that they were all precious. One of the students suggested choosing the best poster but I objected. I explained that all of the posters were great and so different that it is impossible to choose one, the best, they are all great.
Apart from that I also wanted to ask the students for their feedback and whether it was easy or difficult to use the words and images in such a way. This was also a precious part of the lesson.
It is also important to mention that this lesson, untraditionally, was longer as it took more than 1 academic hour that we normally spend on Art in our Art Explorers. I could do it because we had a double English on that day and it was absolutely necessary as only a few of my students are the regular creators and I did notice that these did have a different time management mode and ideas generation mode. The others needed more time to make decisions, to generate ideas and to execute them. Which is something to bear in mind. If it hadn’t been the last day before the term break, we would have created in one lesson and carried out the presentation + feedback on the following day.
The teacher watches and ponders…
Oh, this was one wonderful lesson!
I was really really curious how my regular class would react to the Art content as out of all the students only three or four attend the Art Explorers regularly, all the other ones do not have the chance to stay for the afterschool classes and only some of them attend our term break classes when these take place.
But it went well…I mean, it is a good lesson and, for me as a teacher, it has been tried and tested so I was confident and I knew that great things might come out of it. But the kids took well to it. They were curious about the artist and his paintings, especially that they were in Russian and they were interested and invested in answering the questions I asked.
The brainstorming session, something that we rarely do in the Art Explorers, also helped because it helped the (potentially) less creative students generate ideas or, at least, to see that there is a range of interpretations to choose from. To be honest, some of the kids really surprised me with their ideas and their interpretations as they were fresh and spot-on.
The presentation was a great idea, and again, something we rarely do, because only in our classes we have more time and a relatively even levels of English for everyone to produce and to understand but it was also worth it. I need to think of how to smuggle elements of it into our Art Explorers classes.
My favourite part, however, apart from the creation, was the feedback and all of the comments the kids made. The general consensus was that sometimes it was easy and sometimes it was not to come up with the ideas and to deal with their execution. I really loved the fact that there was such a variety of the interpretations and they the kids had a chance to see everyone else’s angle, too, further broadening their horizons. Some of my favourite ones were the following: travel represented by the sights from around the world, travel represented by things that we need to travel, travel represented by the flags of the countries that the artist likes, travel represented by the flags of the countries that start with the letters t, r, a, v, e and l, travel represented by the travel associations that look like the letters of the word or, even, travel represented by the potential problems which you might encounter while travelling…
The most beautiful line and the one that I will finish this post with was a question from one of my students, one of those cool one, the older ones, the ones who do not attend the regular art classes. It went like that:
the idea this time was taken from Global English 4, with the unit 5 whole focused on storytelling. There is an activity there with a framework to write a story: you roll the dice and choose one of the options for the time of the story, the setting, the characters and the dilemma. This grid gave me the idea for our lesson and it helped me shape the preparation stage to our writing. It can easily be replaced with a much easier vocabulary set, adapted to the level of the students. And a few die.
We started the lesson in our usual way, with hellos, our hello song and an exercise to practise past tense, our main grammar thing this month.
We revised the main parts of a story that we would use mentioned above and the dialogue and why we have it in the story (to help us express emotions in a story better)
I showed the kids the template written on the board and I read the story I wrote before the lesson using the dice and the framework from the book
We put together a few stories, using the same framework, and a variety of set-ups: everyone rolling and contributing one element at a time, everyone contributing an element each, in turns (i.e. 9 different days, 9 different locations etc), each child contributing their own element, without the support of the book etc.
Afterwards, we started to work on our own stories. I kept the coursebooks open for the kids to have some sources of support and ideas but even before I managed to finish giving the instructions, some of my kids were asking ‘Can we use our ideas, please?’
Everyone had a handout (see above) and we were going step by step, with me modelling and creating my second story on the board and making sure that everyone was on the ball as we went along.
In the end, we added the title and signed the story.
When the stories were ready, we had a reading session and all of them were read out loud. With one of my groups, I had to suggest three options: a) the story is read by the child, b) the story is read by the teacher, c) the story is read by the teacher only (for the sake of my shiest student). I introduced all the stories and we had a round of applause at the end, for everyone.
We haven’t done it yet but I want to type up and print all of the stories for the following issue of our school journal so next week I am going to ask each student to write a short description of the illustration they want the A.I. to create for their story.
Why we like it
The dice story was a perfect introduction to the lesson and an ideal idea-generator. I decided to use the coursebook as it is, in order to expose the students to the real un-graded language.
It was an easy thing to write (it was short) but it had enough for funny and entertaining stories which my kids’ work proved.
By adding two lines of dialogue to the framework in the coursebook, it became even easier and more fun to write and to read.
Initially, I planned it as a one-lesson event but seeing how much they benefited from extended practice and preparation, I extended it into two 45-minute classes.
All of the kids got really into writing their stories. One of my students literally dragged me into the classroom, from the break, as, in his opinion, I wasn’t walking fast enough and he wanted to start work as soon as possible.
All of the stories that were written are great and I am really proud of my students, but there are four or five that are really way above the average, with the funny dialogue and an unexpected ending, a really good piece of work!
I am planning to use the dice framework to prepare a similar but simpler sets for the everyday use, for us to tell little stories in the beginning of every lesson while we are still practising the past tense. I am hoping that now the kids will be able to tell these stories in pairs.
It has been quite a while since I wrote in the series (the first episode is here, the most recent here). I was travelling in the beginning of March and I couldn’t write and later I just didn’t feel like putting together a piece, just because the schedule said so. I didn’t, I decided to be nice to myself. However, it also made me think that maybe the time has come to change things here a tiny little bit. Even in January and December, half of the post went along the lines of ‘no changes’ and I realised that we (the class) have changed so much that new solutions have to be put into use.
I will still keep notes here, because some of the things we use might be useful for other teachers and I still need this series as a way of reflecting on my teaching and their learning and progress but I will not be on monthly basis.
The routine et al.
All the new tricks I have added and how they work for us:
the nicknames we still use although the question I ask now is ‘Am I writing your name or your nickname?’, just to give the students some freedom and flexibility. Those that feel creative on the day can express themselves (and some do a lot of that, our current record is 8 lines of a nickname) and some just use their names, sometimes written in a different colour or with a heart. The other kids are always curious to see who is choosing what each day and sometimes they add detail, help with translation or correct me when I, accidentally, use the wrong nickname or when I use the name instead of the nickname. Which, really, just shows that they are listening and paying attention. And that’s all I want. Plus, it is definitely something that we do together, a feature of our community. When someone comes late to class or when we exchange groups and Class A comes after Class B, they try to guess who chose what as their name.
the improvisation song is still with us (and it has been now a year and three months). Sometimes we sing once, sometimes more than once and I love the kids continue to use it to express themselves in English, to talk about emotions, to experiment with different ways of singing certain words and how we started to use it as call – response song whenever there is a question or whenever they just feel like reacting in their own ways (instead of just repeating the verse). More creativity? Yes, please!
give your teacher a grade: admittedly, it is not something I do every week but I try to included it once in a while, more or less twice a month. I am trying to use different techniques like leaving notes and grades on the board or preparing cards with specific questions (Was it difficult? Was it interesting? etc).
the grades for the week: I still write notes to summarise the performance of the students over the week only now we have a few more categories, although these vary depending on the week. This week, for example, we had: English, Maths, Behaviour, Notebook (we are working on handwriting and neat notes) and Accuracy (a specific task we did in Maths). The kids usually get to see them on Monday and they are still really curious about them. And they care. Sometimes they want to tell everyone what they got, sometimes they check with me or ask additional questions, they always read.
new rules were added, too, based on what we have been going through, emotions and lessons, basically the things that seemed like something that we might use in the future. These include ‘Get it together’ (a nice call to action from a song), ‘My feelings are the message from my brain’ (also from a song) and ‘Wait’ (just because we need it, still and desperately, too!).
Story, Socialising and Creativity
All our English classes have been about stories as the whole unit in our book has been devoted to adventures, superheroes, stories, adjectives to describe heroes and we used that opportunity!
We have already finished but we managed to: introduce and properly practise Past Simple, lots of regular and irregular verbs and questions, talk about our yesterdays, we watched and talked about some clips from ‘How to Tame Your Dragon?, we talked about types of stories and why we have narrative and dialogue, we wrote and talked about our favourite stories, we wrote a short story and we read ‘Splat the Cat. The Name of the Game’ because it seems to be a perfect story for us and all the problems we still deal with while playing.
Our story lesson was particularly memorable because we created a few beautiful pieces, we had a reading session in two language, we praised everyone and I want to type up all the stories and turn them into another issue of our school magazine. I will only have to ask the kids to describe what kind of an illustration they would like to have with their story. We will only have to write some description for the kind A.I. to create them. Next week.
We haven’t done any other creative tasks, not properly, but I noticed that kids expressed a lot of interest in the creations that always dry on the window sill after my Art Explorers and I think it might be a sign that I need to think of something like that.
The teacher
I have been a tired teacher in February. I was busy with all the other project (term break camp, conference and the real life errands) but I have had quite a few good moments like realizing that we have really made progress regarding reading and writing and that we have actually learnt how to understand and use fractions and decimals.
The classroom management and bringing up the kids never stops (never never never) but we have made a lot of progress and I know we are going to be fine. It is great to know that while some of my kids keep repeating ‘I don’t like school’ or ‘I want to go home’, they also add, to each other, mostly, ‘I like English, though’ and ‘I really like Maths in English’ so there is some comfort in it, too.
This week was simply a repeat of the previous week’s class, with the only variation being some new sentences in our game (‘What are you doing?’) and a new set of pictures for the presentation and this time we used the famous paintings. This stage of the lesson was relatively short but that is because the artist would make a proper entrance.
The same artist. Twice.
The artist
The guest and the Artist of the Day was J.M.W. Turner who visited in the past. I decided to bring him back because he felt perfect as a representation of movement through a very simple medium of the sea and the clouds.
Normally, the stage in which I show the kids my model happens a bit later in the lesson, just before we start creating. In this particular lesson, however, I changed the order and before revealing who the artist was I presented my two paintings: the seascape painted practically with one colour and almost with no lines and the other one with plenty of colours and plenty of lines. This was to demonstrate the difference and to encourage my students to use these two basic tools later on in the lesson. I also asked the kids which one they liked more. (Unsurprisingly, the second one, for the majority of students but there were some who liked the peace and quiet of the first one, too!)
Afterwards, we looked at some of the paintings created by Turner and how he tried to depict the movement in them. It happened almost naturally that they started to express their opinion (‘It is beautiful’, ‘It is scary’, etc).
Here you can find a very interesting article about the movement in art.
Here is a whale jumping out of the water…
The art
Last week we worked with watercolours and the task was ridiculously simple: draw the sun, the sky and the water (just like Turner did!) and try to show the movement using the colours and the lines.
This was a day of surprises in the classroom and here is the list of the things that surprised me most:
how easy it is to create a beautiful seascape, even for the artists who are only five or six or eight
how touching are all the images the children created
how involved all of my students got into the task despite the fact that we are a mix bunch and there are some who love art and creating and those who don’t really do it very frequently
how they approached the task and how they adapted it to their own needs and perspectives, by adding human figures or animals or boats to accentuate the movement, by changing the setting and visualising movement in nature in the mountains or in the fields and how proud they were of their works
how easy it was for them to experiment with the colours, the lines and the settings
how un-coincidental all the decisions were. And I know it because I could hear what they were talking about while they were working.
how they enjoyed the task
how the youngest artist painted a very calm and uneventful sea but then decided to experiment with the materials and his sky was, in fact, created with the wheels of the toy car, resulting in thin black clouds
and how the other young artist, almost as young, but attending our classes since September, has shown a lot more maturity and understanding of the task (though I love both pictures!)
how two of them decided to change the settings and go for the mountains instead
how one of my older students found a new passion for colour and for experimenting with mixing different shades and colours
how one of my most talented just went for a huge, uncontrollable cloud, a hurricane almost
how this most precious picture was created by one of my students, two days after the lesson, just because we have found the van Gogh background in the stack of the recycled paper. How the real artist saw the movement in the clouds and how the transformed the sky into the sea because the idea lingered…
The mountains, just before the movementThe mountainsThe cat under the skyThe sea and the sky
Oh, I was so not sure what to do with March this year…Last year we did ‘Monochrome’ and so repeating and extending the theme was an option, of course, but I wanted something else. I was brainstorming with me, myself and this is how I stumbled on the idea of movement. M is for movement!
The funny thing is that when I get those ideas, the theme for the month, it is never a fully-fledged curriculum. I starts with the word and the alliteration and then I go on brainstorming and coming up with ideas. For instance, right now, half-way through ‘the unit’, we have had two great lessons but I still don’t know what we are doing with the rest of the month. The only thing I know is that the ideas will come to me, for sure.
The language
As regards the language, I decided to continue our theme from the previous month, the verbs and the Present Continuous, because I have a cunning plan of turning it all into picture description and, eventually, into storytelling. We still play our ‘What are you doing game?’ and describing different pictures, in the most simple of ways. And we also sing Pete the Cat’s, Rocking in my school shoes.
The artist
In the first lesson of the month, we did not have one Artist of the Day. Instead, I introduced a few different creators who helped us illustrate how movement can be depicted in art: through humans, shapes and lines, colour, nature, texture, animals and even words. This is, probably, the biggest number of artists that I have ever manged to squeeze in one lesson with Chagall, Bulatov, Hokusai, Kandinsky, van Gogh, Samokish and Riley. Seven. Wow!
It was lovely to see that my kids recognised some of the paintings as we used van Gogh, Bulatov and Chagall before…
We started with looking at my example that I prepared before the lesson and called ‘Walking the snake’ to illustrate the idea and the whole project: choosing one or more of the characters from the photographs and giving them a new life – a new activity, a new environment and a new movement.
Then we outlined the main stages of the whole process (1) choose the photograph(s), 2) choose the new settings, 3) draw and glue or glue and draw, 4) think of the title) and we got down to work.
And I was working with the kids, creating my own pictures, to better illustrate the stages and to help them generate ideas for theirs.
If I were to summarise this lesson and my associations with it, it would be through the smile that appeared on my face every single time I walked past the noticeboard in the hallway where our pictures were displayed for a few weeks. Every single time. And that’s because they are beautiful.
The movement in the pictures is more or less distinct but all of the characters are doing something in their new settings although sometimes we know it only from the title of the picture (‘Doing nothing’). One of my students also tried to make a moving picture in the form of a simple puppet. Some of the pictures were even controversial (if you look closely, ‘Sitting’ is set in the bathroom) but it met all the requirements of the task and I had to accept them. One of my students, one of the more creative ones, took the task to a brand new level and focused not on the humans but on the place and, of course, I allowed that as I was very curious what will come out of it.
I would really like to use this technique and this task in one of our regular lesson, I just need to think what piece of grammar I can combine it with…
February is our Fun Cartoon February but language-wise I decided to focus on Present Continuous to work on verbs and to get us ready for storytelling later on in the year. This is also a great TPR-friendly structure that comes in very handy and gives us a chance to move a little bit when we meet at around 4 pm, already a bit tired after a whole long day at school. We have a set of basic activities for that, tried and tested, that include making sentences based on stencils, Pete the Cat and his ‘Rocking in my school shoes’ (video and song) and a miming-guessing game (the calss asking:’Sasha, what are you doing?’, Sasha demonstrating and the kids guessing).
The artist
The day has come! Jean-Michel Basquiat is here! It has taken some time for him to arrive (mea culpa!) but it is finally happening. I was racking my brain in order to find a match for February and my own alliteration challenge because I really (really) wanted to deal with Basquiat (and with Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Harring) as soon as possible.
I introduced him to my students in the usual way (name, photo, country, favourite thing) and we looked at a few of his creations, including one of the self-portraits, cats and his ‘Robot man’. Funnily enough, my kids found some of his pictures a bit scary. That is why we didn’t spend a lot of time on that and we moved on to his technique because that was, really, my main aim for this lesson.
Before the lesson I prepared my own model of the heart because it made it a lot more easier to explain what ‘layering’ is all about. We looked all of the materials I prepared on the table and we tried to count how many I used in my picture and what they were.
My own piece
The art
Apart from the number of layers that my picture helped with, we also made a list of stages that we need to go through and I wrote them on the board: 1. the draft with a pencil, 2. the outline with a marker, 3. and more: all of the other materials, as many as you want and 4. the final one: glitter. The only thing that was obligatory for everyone was the topic, a heart as we had our lesson in the week of St. Valentine’s Day that our school was getting ready for.
This was a great process art lesson, an amazing process art lesson, in fact. I experienced it myself, while creating my own heart. Apart from just having fun, working with all of the materials and resources and experimenting with them brought me a lot of pleasure. Certainly, I was hoping that my students will also be able to experience that. Guess what? They did!
Different children chose their own approach to the resources and the number of different materials and layers to work with. I didn’t want to interfere with that, even though some of them chose only or two resources. I tried to suggest other solutions but I respected their final decisions. This was an interesting balance to those of my students who went over the top and used absolutely every single material that I had prepared. Or more, just because they found some random bits of coloured paper in the glue box.
Two resources onlyOnly markers)
My favourite thing was probably the fact that the kids went into the task with a completely open mind, willing to experiment, to try new resources and the new combinations of resources and to learn from each other, as well. We discovered that tinfoil can be torn and cut, it can be coloured and glued or glued and painted over. I shared with the kids that you can paint with acrylic paints and a wet tissue and I looked at how they liked working with our almost professional acrylic paints and that a piece of string actually makes a difference. I myself added a few more bits to my picture just observing what my students were doing.
One of my students came to our class for the first time ever and it was lovely to see how unexpectedly creative he is and how beautifully he applied the technique to create his heart.
Have a look at the beautiful pieces in our gallery…
I think that, after a year and a half with my kids in the classroom and going to school everyday, I finally arrived at the point where I can say: yes, we’ve got the routine and yes, things work the way I want.
It doesn’t mean, of course, that all that time, until now we have been struggling and failing time after time (so, if you are a less experienced teacher, please do not despair) or that we are not bothered by the everyday issues anymore (of course, we are, that is what primary is about, issues, issues, issues, I don’t think that will ever go away). What I mean is that it took us all that time to arrive at an understanding what life is about: we come here, we speak English (we try!), we learn new things, there are some procedures, some traditions, some rules and both parties are aware of what we are doing here.
Our hello routine has been the same for a year now (I only realised it recently, with the first day of February as this was, last year, when we started to create our own songs), somewhere on the way we added little bits (Hello Master and the other roles, What time is it and counting days to Christmas or, now, spring). We have had our rules and our rewards chart. All this is in place and all this works.
The things that appeared recently, include:
the nicknames that some of the students choose for themselves on daily basis. It is not an obligation, you can stick to your name, of course, but I love to see them create and choose these depending on their mood and the day. More language production, always!
the rules that they wrote themselves that I turned into a poster (more of that below)
the birthdays we added to our months posters on the wall and the holidays and things to be looking forward to that we keep adding to it, too.
I was woried that, on coming back from a long, winter break completely wild and rowdy. They did, true, but the impact was somehow softened by the fact that my students were trickling back into the classroom, instead of arriving all on one day. That meant that we went through ‘September the 1st’ a few times in January ( = kids coming back, being too excited, too talkative, too forgetful about the rules) but, eventually, everyone got back and I got much better at dealing with it.
Our main song is still our improvised Month Song and the kids are getting better and better and coming up with new ideas for our everyday singing. Despite the fact that we’ve been singing it for a year, the kids haven’t got bored with it and it is our way of saying how we are, what is good, what is not and what we want and whose birthday is coming up.
Apart from that we have been singing the Fraction Song from Hopscotch and we are slowly falling in love with the other videos on the channel. It is absolutely amazing that a song can be written about fraction and that it can be catchy, funny and very (very!) beneficial for Maths learning.
Socialising
There hasn’t been much of that, apart from us sharing a room, a lesson and activities so that is definitely something we should be working with in the current month…
Creativity
Here are our projects and mini-projects from January:
a role-play with emotions in our communication skills series
How do you see the world?, based on the story
‘My favourite desserts’ which was our first project with A.I. Kids had to describe their three favourite desserts and the A.I. created illustrations for us
a few Fractions Fun lesson in which we used stickers, craft paper and just regular paper to help us understand fractions
coming up with names and nicknames for our lessons, sometimes a name lasts a week, sometimes it lasts a day. My favourite ones include: Crazy Dave, Pablo Picasso, Capybara Leader, Ironman, Air, Earth, Fire and Water.
Teacher
I have been a happy teacher in January. We had our test #2 and kids did really well. They barely needed help with the reading, they all just sat down and read it. My contribution involved only reading and nodding in agreement. I was really proud of them! We were reading!
We have also had a lot of good Maths lessons. To be honest, when I was writing a summary of the term to include in our end-of-term reports, I felt a bit dizzy, there was so much there and so many topics that are not so easy at all. And yet, we did it and we managed and not only that. We did a great job!
We are always having a laugh while coming up with our nicknames and it is lovely to see that some of them really to be creative, some of them choose a nickname just for this day, some – one that is closely connected to their personality, some, on some days, just opt for their own names.
A to-do list for February
more pairwork and teamwork (we’ve already started!)
a story and a creative project (we’ve already started!)
