ArtLab Summer School Day 3 -Alfred Sutton Primary School Year 6

ArtLab is working with Primary Schools in the Reading area on our summer school programme. The students come to the University of Reading Art Department and, with the guidance of students at the University, experiment with new techniques of making art, new technologies and creative ways of thinking. The day consists of three activities: Selfie Sphere, Making Moves, and Listen and Draw.

On Wednesday the 26th of June, my group started with “Selfie Sphere” – creating self-portraits and taking 360 degree photos. The students seemed to struggle to get out of their comfort zones with drawing their self portraits. Many of them still felt the need to start their drawings in pencil and erase them after, and I tried to encourage them to consider new ways of drawing, and to stop viewing works as failures. We had some good fun taking our 360 photos together.

Next was “Making Moves” – creating stories, sculptures and 3d scans. The students took very well to this activity, making a variety of inventive sculptures, such as a house, a raft, a plate of noodles and sushi. Everyone was so excited about making their sculptures that we didn’t get around to scanning anything in my group.

Finally, “Listen and Draw” – a silent disco making drawings to Sound Art. The students were a bit hyper from lunch and I learned a lot about managing high energy levels. They weren’t very interested in the music we had to offer, and instead requested we play Disney songs. We introduced some new activities to calm the group down.

Finally, after a fun day of creative learning, we held a parade with all of the students, wearing the masks they had made in the Selfie Sphere activity, marching through the Art Department, and taking a big group selfie together. Thanks for reading!