10/06/16

Following on from our first visit to the school we made some mind-maps based on the concept of British values, as this was the focus of the school's art week. Initially we had difficulty coming up with topics to branch out from. Even though we found out that Year 3 are doing printing inspired by sporting logos and the 2012 olympics, and Year 4 are doing work inspired by the Beatles' Sgt Peppers lonely hearts club album cover, we thought we could choose a different thing to focus on to expand the children's understanding of British values rather than redoing subjects they've already done at school. This way our work would tie in with what the children are doing with art while also providing a different perspective. We chose to branch out from the topics of cultural diversity, London and British artists.

We found out many of the children at the primary school have English as a second language and from living in Croydon I know that the surrounding area of Selhurst and Croydon has a lot of racial and ethnic diversity. From this we concluded that there is likely a lot of diversity in the school and quite a few different cultures. We tried to come up with various different things related to different cultures, artists and areas in London with high diversity. This helped inform our ideas for workshops such as using spices and seeds to make pictures. 

We looked at the city of London,  and the key monuments there, for inspiration on the types of places to bring up or focus on in our workshops. London is a huge capital and cultural centre of the world and we live in it so it made sense to try and derive inspiration from the city. In addition we noted areas that are quite interesting like Brixton and Southbank. People from our group wrote down the areas of London they live in as well and it created a nice picture of significant places that are popular destinations for Londoners that the students may not have visited or heard of before. 

We also looked at notable British artists such as Grayson Perry and Chris Ofili, to get an idea of some artists we could tell the students about or do more in depth research about to find ideas for workshops. It would be interesting to look at British artists that have heritage from other countries to see how their culture comes through in their work.