Refining the Creativity

To continue with our learning around perseverance and overcoming anxieties, we have spent week 9 creating some fairly impressive artworks. Following on from movie making, it was apparent that The Boys needed more scaffolding around conquering their fears and anxieties during challenging tasks.

The artwork was presented to The Boys as a complex task that would take time and effort. They would make mistakes and all would be fine. They would be asked to try again and to make improvements. We role played scenarios and appropriate responses. We discussed how different challenging moments made us feel and how we could help each other to do our best.

We began by pencil sketching the planets and rockets. We discussed how paint works and that detail was not necessary in our pictures - this didn't stop the boys drawing all sorts of intricate pieces.
Colours were added step by step allowing decent drying time.

Mistakes were covered with white paint, allowed to dry and redone. On two occasions the boys chose to paint out complete objects and did so happily, knowing that they were improving on their work, not making their task more difficult.

In contrast to movie making, no one gave up and no one struggled with the challenges they faced.
I think that this was due to 3 things.

• A more stepped out process 
• Each kid had their own work to do and were not sharing
• The strongly scaffolded behaviour aspect prior to beginning each session of painting.

We finished by sharing our work on our blogs and the hard copy will be mounted on the corridor wall outside our class. 

To share on our blogs we attempted another challenging creative task - rather than simply posting a photo of our painting I took a photo of each boy with his artwork against a blue background. We then learnt how to use the Alpha key in Keynote to remove the background. The boys were then able to insert a larger version of their own picture as the background.

Because we had to use the classroom iMacs to utilise Keynote, the use of our class shared Google Drive folder was needed so that the boys could access their photos and re-share their completed work to access on their Chromebook to blog.

So, overall a HUGE improvement in emotional responses to complex challenges and as a result, some awesome pieces of art that we are all proud of.