Day 4 - 9 February 2011

Well here they are....some of them anyway...still a work in progress. 

 Today was a really funny day.  I was a bit bored by all the election talk on the radio so I was delighted to get into the school today out of the rain.  The artist divided the group up so for the first 15 minutes the ones that had not attended last week got a chance to catch up again.  We had all 31 in today and the room was full.  There was wool and paint and the easter eggs from the other group on the floor and all sorts happening.  It was a hive of colourful activity.  The Echo photographer was in photographing the kids for the school photo too.

About half way through the class, one of the boys came to me and told me his friends puppet was leaking.  We had filled the plastic milk bottles with water initially to weigh them down and for some strange reason this particular bottle seemed to have a tiny pinhole in it near the bottom and his purple tissue paper top was wet.  After we had let the water out of it, his friend turned to him and said: 'Well..., her waters broke anyway!'  I was on the floor laughing because this kid was about 9 or 10.  He has obviously heard that somewhere before.  

 more dudes...

There was hair flying and eyelashes and eyebrows appearing on previously blank looking faces.  It was also quite funny to see some of the self conscious, giggling boys dancing around the table with a bra that had mistakenly found it's way into the fabric box.   There were all sorts of glittery scarves being pulled out of the rummaging box and the puppets where starting to look like little people now.   When she was showing the new lot how to mix colours, a good few of them wanted to use dark brown and one boy even asked if he could paint his face  black.  He eventually ended up with a very dark brown face and it looked great amongst all the other pale ones. Some also had freckles. I had mentioned to the artist that the question of what constitutes skin colour had come up on my blog.     One little girl decided she wanted to do one side pale and the other half brown.    I asked her why she wanted to do that and she replied that she wanted hers to be different to all the others.  I was amazed that even at that young age, they were already trying to distinguish their work from the others, by doing things which would probably be considered quite out of the ordinary in a normal (not art) context.  I thought that this was wonderful because it showed me, that they recognised that some things are different and that's ok too.  

I came home ready to give my video piece another crack... d day tomorrow for that.