Storytelling Mural, starting to paint

On wednesday I was very pleased to see the sunshine out as it was my first session at High Oakham Primary painting their storytelling mural with class 5.

The first group had the exciting task of helping me clean the wall. They did a very good job, getting rid of a lot of dirt and dust and giving us a good surface to paint on.

The plan for the day was to paint the background for the first two sections of the wall, the story tree wall and the blackboard wall. So the groups were painting big expanses in one or two colours.

The background is pretty much done, just a bit of touching up to do and then next week we'll be adding some details.

Storytelling Mural- planning and design

I'm currently working at High Oakham Primary school in Mansfield on a project with the Mighty Creatives. The school has asked if I could transform a wall in the playground into something which encourages storytelling during playtime.

I meet with the group of year 5's and came up with a plan...

It turns out that I had meet the same group 3 years ago when they were in year 2 and worked with them as part of a literacy day based around the book "Where the wild things are", where the group made words trees.

We decided to build on this idea and came up with the plan to paint a word tree on to the school wall. On the word tree would be words choosen by the class that fell into four categories, characters, settings, a happening and a genre. These would be the starting point for story telling. On the wall we would also have a blackboard to write stories and a backdrop for acting stories out in front off.

We were all happy with the idea so the next step was to get designing.

We started getting our imaginations working by thinking of ways to change our fingerprints into pictures.

We then went out and looked at the wall and started drawing designs for each section of the Mural.

I then went away and drew the ideas into a plan

next week we start painting.

Goodbye to gravity

I've just finished working on a project with The Mighty Creatives at Bentinck Primary School. I worked with year 1's and 2's on a space themed project alongside practitioner David Matthews.

The idea was to use the term's topic of Space as a starting point to develop the groups imagination and communication. The group decided on the direction for the project with year 2 taking on the role of the astronuts and year 1 becoming the aliens. David created a theatrical space adventure with the group in which they travelled to another planet, went on a space walk and encountered an alien garden. I made props and costumes with the group with the results being shown to parents and teachers. I had a great time with the school, the children were very lively and enthusiastic through out the project. I also got to spent a good amount of time making a giant silver rocket and drawing aliens which is never a bad thing!

A space backdrop drawn collaboratively by year 2

The backdrop takes shape...

Designs for the Alien masks...

and the completed ones...

The rocket in progress.