Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council are working in partnership with Supporting Leicestershire Families (SLF) to offer Arts Award Discover to 16 young people between the ages of five and eleven. The SLF team work with the most vulnerable families in our area, providing them with the chance to access educational, practical and life enhancing opportunities.
Delivering Discover
This project took place over 10 weeks, each session lasted one and a half hours. Each child had an Arts Award Discover log book to store their evidence in. The programme of activity involved introducing the children to as many different art forms as possible. This made them look at the world around them and think about art and design as something central to our way of living instead of being only something they might see in museums and galleries.
Examples of some of our sessions have included:
Mask making: We used ready formed masks and decorated them
Making musical instruments: These were made out of plastic bottles, margarine containers and other recycled materials so we could encourage
further activity at home that didn’t rely on the purchase of expensive materials
Storytelling: A great opportunity for planning Discover Part C: Share. The children make up stories using whatever items they had made.
Painting: A general opportunity to express themselves and we learnt about artists. One boy wasn’t particularly interested in painters. He lives on a farm so we researched Naïve artists who painted their prize pigs and cows!
Our top tips:
- First identify the families you think would want to take part in Arts Award activities and then support the children to attend each week. For example, if the children are from families who have been identified as being the most vulnerable in the area, they may need help with transport or to be picked up and returned home
- Try to be mindful of wider circumstances when planning activities. For example, some of the children may have experienced very difficult home conditions, memories of which could be prompted by certain activities so
try to keep activities general and don’t ask them to draw on personal things like what their bedroom is like or where they went on holiday
- Plan activities that can be completed within the session so if children can’t attend each week they won’t feel as if they have missed out and need to catch up
- To fully engage with the children, tailor the sessions to their interests – this is an opportunity to be really creative. Being an adviser is as much about learning from the young people as it is about guiding them in
their learning
- With this client group it is particularly important to use permission slips relating to taking and publishing photographs and film, using the names of children etc
- If parents attend with their children give them the same materials as the children have so they can do their own pieces of work. This helps parents talk to their children
- Encourage regular sharing of the work. Children taking part in our projects share their work at the end of every session with other members of the group, SLF workers who come to pick them up, and in some cases parents
- Collect the Discover logs at the end of each session as sometimes they can go home, never to be seen again!
- Enable children to work and create evidence in a way that suits them. We take photographs of everything and encourage the children to write captions to explain them. We also use the computer to allow them to type information to print off. We provide a quiet space which is invaluable for
children who have individual needs and who may be overwhelmed by larger groups from time to time, or for those who misbehave and can distress others in the group.