The Art of Change: What, How and Should we? – day 1

In this Half Term’s art course, children alongside artist Sarah Carne have been getting just a little bit political in the lead up to the General Election.

We have been using art to help children find their voice, explore how decisions have consequences and how they can make a difference in the world.

We have found out that good art delivers a message and that it can be hard to discover what we have to say and how we can say it through our work. Working as a team can hep us to develop this message.

We began the morning with some high energy games that involved making simple decisions

We continued by brainstorming through words and pictures a list of things that we like.

We combined these thoughts into a master list of our favourite things – this would form a starting point for exploring limits, boundaries, decisions and consequences.

We had some long discussions around why too much of what we like can often be a bad thing, causing bad decisions and difficult consequences. For example we unanimously agreed that too many sweets was a bad thing and our parents were correct to limit them, and surprisingly that parents were right to limit screen time!

We went on to discuss the aim of the workshop: to make a game that explored decisions we come across during our lives and how these decisions have consequences. We began by making the board.

Factory style, we worked together to paint 100 red and white squares. We enjoyed chatting together while we revelled in the paint in a lighthearted atmosphere after the meaty discussions we had just begun!

Some of us got quite tactile with the paint as we explored many different ways to apply paint to a surface!

Our painted squares dried in the sunshine ready to add numbers.

After lunch we got down to some more meaty discussions. We spoke more about decisions and consequences covering issues as diverse as playing fairly, breaking rules, the use of technology in the home, owning a pet and moving to a new country.

Children worked in groups to brainstorm 5 things they thought their parents would change about their lives at home and 5 things they would change. These ideas would form the basis of questions that will form part of our snakes and ladders game.

This was a hard activity and proved to the children that art can be difficult, explore complex ideas and that asking questions is something artists do all the time. We had lots of really interesting discussions while we developed the questions for our game.

It was definitely time for some more painting!

We worked out a simple system to decide which numbers would be red and which white and got to work with our own set of numbers.

We chose simple bold designs, embellished with patterns.

As they went out in the sun to dry we began ordering them and checking back to see if we had all the numbers we needed for a board game.

We now had a board ready to join together!

Tomorrow we will make snakes that will ask those all important questions.

For a final activity we made some placards exploring some of the ideas raised in our discussions. The brief was to think of something we would campaign for that would change the world for the better! We are looking forward to tomorrow to continue developing and finally playing our game – we hope our parents will be there to play with us – but will they make the right decisions?