Thinking on my feet! - wearable bracelet thingies......

With a bit of extra time to play with, I needed to think on my feet! I thought it would be great for the pupils to have something to hold, but in their hands would be no good as they wouldn't be able to drum. So I thought about safety pins... no good for H&S! So we just used masking tape as its re- positionable and can be stuck and stuck again. The children made these wearable collage bracelets. They worked so well! The children loved them as they were more colour to wear, and they had the freedom again to make something either personal or just plain bold. It was fab to see and even fabber to see them keeping hold of them as they left school to be picked up by mums and dads.

#bodyadornment    #brazilianheaddresses

Paper headdress workshop with littlies! Brazilian carnival day at a Surrey Infant School.....

Just recently I has the lovely experience of going back into the Primary school world and ran a set of workshops with really little ones at the wonderful St. Peter and St. Paul's C of E Infant School in Chaldon, Surrey. I was there as part of a carnival day, where the 87 pupils would be working with me making headdresses out of simple paper components, and with a drummer and dancer too. The whole day would culminate in a kind of performance and all the children would have the chance to experience a taste of Carnival!! Reception Year 1, and Year 2 were all involved, as were the TA's and the class teachers. We had about an hour with each class, so it was pretty full on to get the headdresses made.

The day was based on a rotating carousel of activities, so it meant that each child worked with each practitioner. I designed things that would be simple to customise and put together. You can see examples of what was made below......

You can see above some of the headdresses the children made. I supplied precut shapes and bands and then the children were able to customise and design their own headdress. The older ones in Yr 2 used the pipe cleaners, ensuring that their headdresses really did jiggle and wiggle when hey dance and played the percussion instruments.

Fantastic to see the teachers get really involved......

Headdresses with animals......

Headdresses as crowns.........

And headdresses that show a rain forest and the animals!

Making headdresses with littlies! Reception to Yr 2 on a Brazilian carnival day!

I had a great time recently working with some really little children at the wonderful school in Chaldon, Surrey - St. Peter and St. Paul C of E Infant School. I was there to work with all the classes from reception up to Year 2. I haven't worked with little children for a while so it was a real change for me! My children are now 16 and 19, so the time when thy were that small was a fair while ago and you adapt to talking with teenagers!!!

The whole school has been focussing on Brazil and each class was a mass of stimulating and vibrant explorations through text and pictures of the theme. It was fantastic to walk into! I designed some simple components for the children to put together. In essence they were headbands with added features, like cut out shapes and pip cleaners. The children were to spend time with a drummer and dancer too and culminating in a performance at the end of the day, so having some jiggly wiggly headdresses were essential!!

Fantastic to see the teacher get involved!

Simple construction methods with pipe cleaners, cut out shapes and squares of sticky vinyl/plastic

Some became crown like.......

Others were little rain forest scenes........

The Year 2 teachers' headdress.... wrapped pipe cleaners and cut out shapes!

And the best thing to see 87 children sat in headdresses and dancing or drumming to a Brazilian beat!