I'm a Student Ambassador at my University: UAL London College of Communications, and the UAL (LCC) Outreach Department runs a lot of extra curricular activities aimed at younger students that aren't at the University stage yet. This means that as an Ambassador, I get the opportunity to help out on projects working with these students, I usually work with year 12's in College for the UAL Insights Summer/Spring/Autumn/Winter Schools, but this time I got the chance to work with a much younger group - 7 to 8 Year olds in Year 3!
During this 8 week project (a couple hours every Friday), my role was to assist the UAL tutor
to support the delivery of a 3D sculpture that the students participated in making. We worked with two Primary schools - Charlotte Sharman Primary School in Elephant and Castle, and The Belham Primary School in Peckham. We did a range of different activities with the children that allowed them to test different creative methods and explore how plastics can be used for art. I missed the first three sessions, however when I began, the kids invited me with sticky PVA glue finger and open arms! They were all so small and happy - it was actually refreshing to see their minds work with all the different materials and decided what approach they would go for.
At Charlotte Sharman, we worked more with tissue paper and painted bottles and Belham was more focused on actually manipulating the plastic bottles with cutting and bending. It was a bit more challenging but the kids actually responded very well and made some beautiful outcomes, we worked with both painted and clear bottles which was a nice contrast within the final piece, and below are some examples from the bottles that the Belham student were working on.
Next are a few images from the final sculpture we built at Charlotte Sharman.
And here are some photo's of the final sculpture at Belham.
On the whole I really enjoyed working with the students and teachers on this project, and it was also interesting to see how both schools got the same project but produced very different outcomes.