With
all their art and soul
June 9, 2006
Creativity
is the lifeblood of a Swindon primary threatened with
closure. Victoria Neumark reports
A typical scene at Windmill Hill primary school, Swindon.
Year 6 have just done Sats, this rainy May afternoon and
are sitting at tables working on William Morris. Some are
making prints, some doing intricate tiny drawings of Morris
motifs in concertina books, some drawing out large pencil
versions of wallpaper patterns. Others yet are working on
models of arts and crafts furniture or large acrylic
portraits of pre-Raphaelitish heads.
On the wall, 19th-century-style journals commenting on
novels that have been read, sketchbooks with leaf patterns.
On the whiteboard is projected a slide from Kelmscott House
and Morris's dictum: "Have nothing in your house that you
do not know to be useful or consider to be beautiful."
Mark Hazzard, headteacher at Windmill Hill, sits down next
to Tom, who is in a mess with his concertina bookbinding.
They soon sort it out. "I never think that there is any
point in not helping when they ask for it. I've got no
bother about helping. There's a learning relationship, you
see," says Mr Hazzard.
Tom looks up. "Have you visited Kelmscott?" Neither
journalist or photographer have. "It's really good," he
assures us. "You can find out a lot about William Morris."
Art leads everything at Windmill Hill, apart from maths,
which is taught as a discrete subject. The results are
tangible and inspirational. Work by Windmill Hill gave rise
to the National Gallery's competition for schools.
Around the primary there are wonderful displays, from silk
hangings to banners of the fish of the Severn (science) to
stained glass windows (history) to 1970s disco fabrics
(technology) to portraits of local businesspeople for the
geography local study. And literacy and English everywhere,
in poems and letters and plays recorded on cassette, and
the wonderful extravaganza of the Christmas play, where
everything, from costumes to music is created afresh each
year. "If you're going to broaden the curriculum, you've
got to find something to broaden it with," says Mark
Hazzard.
He adds with a wince, that this does not mean one
jam-packed arts week or two. "One of my pet hates is arts
weeks. They need to be doing it all the time, and to take
it on. We try to foster a kind of workshop approach, so
that everyone, even in reception, is responsible for
getting out and putting away all their stuff, but also they
get to take it home."
He smiles. "There are TV sets all over this area with our
pupils' artworks on the tops of them still."
Each pupil gets a water-colour box when they start Year 3
and refill blocks ad lib. The box stays with them and when
they leave they take it too - a reminder of seven years
well spent. The money, says Mark Hazzard, is negligible and
the reward is so great "because it belongs to them, they
look after it better, though some are tattier than others".
For six pupils sitting at a desk drawing out William Morris
designs, a debate.
"I like William Morris," says Timothy.
"I liked Macbeth," replies Kimberly.
"Macbeth isn't art," retorts Timothy.
"I know, but I liked it better. I think William Shakespeare
was a better artist than William Morris," says Kimberly
spiritedly.
Daniel weighs in. "He didn't paint any pictures,
Shakespeare. But he knew about the human mind. If he had
have painted pictures they would have been better than
William Morris's."
Did someone say something about creativity and thinking
skills? They certainly ought to for, shameful to relate,
and thanks to a local authority reorganisation, this
one-form entry school, with excellent results, is
threatened with imminent closure though everyone who goes
to it loves it and its reception class for September is
full.
Mr Hazzard is sad about the future, but still puts
everything, as do his talented staff, into the day-to-day
experience of the children. "Wherever I go I buy postcards
and collect junk," he says. "I found a lot of windows being
thrown out so we got glass paints and did stained glass. If
someone's throwing out fabric, we can cut it up and weave.
Old wood is great to paint on: that's how we did the Wilton
Diptych."
It was Windmill Hill's work on the Wilton Diptych, which
grew out of a visit by Mark Hazzard to the National Gallery
in 1995, from which the gallery's popular Take One Picture
sprung. Now in its 10th year, the scheme offers a programme
of Inset and visits to encourage primary teachers to focus
artwork around one particular painting (this year, The
Marquise de Seignelay and Two of her Sons by Pierre
Mignard, see TES Teacher, May 26, 2006) and enter it to be
displayed at the National Gallery. The beautiful little
blue and gold paintings still adorn the entrance hall of
Windmill Hill.
"Art," says Mark Hazzard, "is not just rewarding and
important in itself.
It gives children a sense of achievement not connected to
getting the right answer. But it also offers children who
are not quick with academic subjects the chance to
experience success instead of failure three times a day."
Creative ideas for art activities across the curriculum
Art with drama
* Dress pupils up and get them to pose for others to paint.
Take a pose from a famous painting, for example, Cezanne's
card players. What is the story?
* Observational drawing. It can be hard to draw simple
shapes, but something with narrative flair, like the card
players or a fishing boat, can liberate children's fingers.
Get them to add lots of detail: what is realistic? The more
they concentrate, the better the result.
Art
* Use acrylic paint. The results are more satisfying, the
colours easier to control. It may stain the children's
clothes, so, says Mark Hazzard, "I always say, I don't mind
if they got marks from school art".
* Get offcuts of copper. Scratch on back with ballpoint
pens. It looks like medieval engraving.
* Use balsa wood to make models. Paint them, put lots of
small objects in a box and create miniature worlds:
prospectors' cabins, schoolrooms, caves.
* For a whole-school end to the year, get everyone to focus
on one painting. It need not be a very fine one: Millais's
The Boyhood of Raleigh produced some very good work at
Windmill Hill. The Beach at Trouville by Monet generated
mobiles, plays, painted clay figures and sand collages.
* For collages: what can you stick together?
* Techniques: what can you do with the other end of the
pencil? What can you do with watercolour paper, acrylic
paper, card, canvas?
English/History
Look at a narrative painting like Frith's Paddington
Station. What stories can be told? What can be learnt about
the Victorian era? What dialogues might be created?
* Go on visits. Local churches, castles, landmarks are full
of stories and crafts. What vocabulary is special to each
site?
* Animation: if children find it hard to concentrate on
language, try animating Plasticine models and making short
films (use help from a museum like At Bristol).
www.at-bristol.org.uk/Storyboards, puppets. Research
comics, Wallace and Gromit. Look at the DVDs.
Science
On a seaside visit, do observational drawings. Borrow
shells, stuffed seagulls, crabs. Research why flora and
fauna are the shape that they are, how they fit in their
habitat. Make banners.
Foundation stage
Make clay houses and clay plaques to celebrate the
children's own houses.
Paint them and/or fire them if possible.
Geography
* If studying India and an Indian village, paint tigers on
sacking. Make toys and puppets out of the same material
Indian children would use.
* For rivers, first make imaginary maps of the kind of
river you think is interesting. What features does it
incorporate? What makes maps useful and beautiful?
* Local study: pastel and pencil portraits of local people.
Perspective drawings of buildings. Why do the buildings
look how they do? (For Windmill Hill, visits are to Wootton
Bassett, a market town with Tudor buildings.
Make maps of shops and facilities. Make posters to
advertise them.
Technology
Aztecs and Mexico: make clay buttons, scratching patterns
in with feathers.
Fire them, paint with Aztec colours. Draw on watercolour
paper in strips, to make patterns on textiles. Draw
chillies, tortillas, chips, red kidney beans: make a
mobile. Make salsa.
Resources
Watercolour set: £1.75 for set of 12 colours from the
Consortium. 50 brushes for £20. Ready-stretched canvases,
buy in bulk, about £1 per canvas. T-shirts from Asda, £1
each. Charity shops and skips:get your parents to look
out.Ask shops for offcuts.
Collect feathers, shells, leaves, sticks.
To enter your
school's work, based on Two Boys and a Girl making Music by
Jan Molenaer, in the National Gallery's Take One Picture
exhibition in Spring/Summer 2007, look on
www.takeonepicture.org
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