Week One - Day One - Darwen Alridge Community Academy

This week we are doing 3 days at Darwen Alridge Community Academy on placement and we will be sitting in in lessons with years from year 7 to year 13.

On the first day I have been with year 7 and year 12, the year sevens had been set a task to do a small painting on a canvas and to do this mixing colours and tones from a well known painter. The sixth formers were continuing with their projects they had been doing for some weeks prior to us coming to the school. The year sevens were given images of landscapes around the north west and photographs of some of Kurt Jacksons own work for inspiration. These are below.  

 

These are some of the canvases the year sevens produced. They were told to use as many bright colours as they could and they did this quite well!

I was interested to see the way Miss Klinck taught, as she took an approach which was very stern and focused on repeatedly telling the class to stop talking and to focus on their work. She also constantly reminded them of their deadline, which was that morning, and encouraged the children to finish before break or they would have to stay. The kids seemed to be really engaged in this lesson and seemed to enjoy working on their canvases. One of the main points of this lesson for the children was that they were to create their own picture but have inspiration for the images given. Some found this easy yet some found this difficult, so as the lesson went on I tried to help the children who found it a bit harder and had potential to become unfocused.  

The approach that Lousie took certainly kept the class in order and focused on what they had to do but for me it is suited to a more academic class but I think that there should be some lenience for the children as they are trying to be creative and some were really struggling. However, I also feel if too much lenience is given they could have completely gone off task and become very unfocused so keeping the young class in control was probably the best idea.

One child was praised for her brilliant work and Louise showed it to all of the class who as well complimented her on her work. This was an enjoyable part of the class for me because the girl seemed so proud of herself as well. This is something that I took away from this class and think in my workshop I will applaud any children who have worked hard even if it is not the best work.