Tuesday 28 June 2016
First Workshop

We had our first workshop with the Crescent Primary School students at our School and also presented our first draft of our proposal to teacher Matthew Lamptey. This workshop was meant to be introductory, getting to know the children and letting them more or less experiment with materials however they wanted. Before they came, we put out a variety of different drawing and painting materials and covered a large table with a big sheet of paper for the children to work on. For the first half the of the workshop we split our group in half, so Me and Maya spoke with Matthew about the proposal and the rest of the group began the workshop, took photographs, supervised the children and asked them questions. The workshop began with us letting the children choose from the materials we set out and drawing whatever they wanted onto the paper for a short period of time, as a warm up exercise. After this we started to ask the children what culture means to them, gave them a new sheet of paper and had them draw in response to culture. This resulted in the children drawing flags as this was likely the simplest way they could understand their culture. They drew flags from the countries their parents and family were from, and it was really nice to see the mixture of all the different flags showing the range of countries the students were descended from. After this we asked the students what they liked and didn't like about the workshop and told them our ideas for what we would do in our next workshop, which we decided in the meeting would be focused around printing.

The children said that they enjoyed their time in the workshop and liked the first task of drawing freely more than the second task where we gave them a topic. This might be because when we asked them to draw from their culture they weren't entirely sure what culture meant,  which means we will need to explain the concept in a simpler way next time. The workshop also needed a bit more structure, even though it was introductory we could've set the students a few more tasks to keep them focused and on track. To move forward, we will be using new materials, something along the lines of mono printing, screen printing or using stencils. As screen printing is quite complicated and time consuming to set up, we weren't sure if that would be suitable for the children and creating stencils would've also been time consuming to design and make, so mono printing would likely be the best option going forward.