Arts Award Good Practice Centre Thomas Ashton School are in the midst of a year of great creative activity, and are telling us about some of what’s taken place in our latest guest blog. They’ve embedded creativity in work across the curriculum, offering potential inspiration for other schools.
Taking the season as inspiration for our art, we started by focusing on the effects of autumn. Young people created works including a leaf sun catcher and a butterfly using leaves, practiced their weaving skills using autumn-coloured paper and used their handprint to create a tree.
One of our classes focused on creating artwork around “People Who Help Us”. Here young people created life size paintings of figures such as a police officer or doctor using the their outline to create the size, and photographs as inspiration for the paintings. As part of our work on Harry Ferguson, young people painted pictures of tractors and designed creations to help make life easier. These ranged from a drink dispenser, flying rockets with gadgets to mend the ship and a robot that did magic tricks.
As part of our September inset we hosted a session on guided art, teaching people to paint who may have little experience. This was a huge hit with our staff and the experience helped them gain their confidence in teaching the children. Since then, we have seen more art produced in class and also an increase in staff confidence when supporting art classes.
We have combined Into Film Clubs with our Arts Award offer. Pupils watch films which are supported with a resource pack. Young people are able to have fun and participate in an arts-based activity introduced through film, which is particularly interesting for those who also enjoy filmmaking. We had our first experience with Planet Earth in 3-D and have used film as an entry point to cover events through the year, such as Their Finest, a war film which linked nicely with Remembrance Day.
A local artist who works with a Drama group all aged over 65 invited our school to take part in an intergenerational project. This would involve our pupils working on a Music and Drama piece with an older generation group and will begin this year. In the meantime the older group performed a play to our pupils called ‘Gotta stay a week at Grandmas’. It well received by the pupils, who helped produce an extra verse for one of the songs performed in the play.
Finally, an ongoing thread of work has a group of young people completing their bucket list of 101 things to do before leaving Thomas Ashton School, which will link to other activities throughout the year. There are lots of arts-based things on the list, so we look forward to seeing what our pupils create next!
Find out about our Good Practice Centres in previous guest blogs, or visit www.artsaward.org.uk/goodpractice