Tapping into the potential of illustrations and creative narratives.
Aimed at primary school
Seven Educational Goals:
To create conversations around art.
To scaffold thinking routines that promote divergent thinking.
To connect picture book art and meaning-making.
To draw on the synergy created by images and words.
To inspire creative imagination.
To build engaging and supportive scenarios for self-expression.
To celebrate the art of storytelling by celebrated author-illustrators, professional storytellers and children’s productions.
Our project has been ignited by the Visual Thinking routines developed by project Zero from Harvard University, and The National Gallery of Art educational programmes.
Within SUPPORT LEARNING holistic approach, we stretch the project to conversations that embrace cognitive and emotional aspects, to build safe and inspiring scenarios for self-expression. Likewise, in our sessions discussion of picture book art also plays an important role in the construction of metacognition skills in the process of meaning-making, with a view to the development of writing and illustration school projects.
Abstract Art with Alma Thomas: Light, Life and her Message
Young Alma Thomas loved to immerse herself in colour. Due to countless racial injustices, her family left their hometown in Georgia and moved to Washington DC. As an art teacher she transmitted her love of art beyond measure. In her sixties she lost vision gradually and was happy to dab her canvas with the patterns of light her eyes could still appreciate. Alma Thomas is the first Black woman to have her work chosen for the White House collection, USA.
Our Visual Thinking Workshop seeks to experience her aesthetics of pattern and colour. Storytelling includes her life mission and creativity to surmount the obstacles on her path.
Cited book: Ablaze with Colour A Story of Painter Alma Thomas by Jeanne Walker Harvey & illustrated by Loveis Wise
Splash of Colour and Music
This workshop walks children through a sensorial experience triggered by a slow look at an abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky. Young participants also step into the world of the young artist, who discovered he perceived colours and music in unison. This session is spiced up with Performed Storytelling and creative imagination games to promote self-expression, as springboard for writing and illustration work by students.
The Noisy Paintbox by Barb Rosenstock & illustrated by Mary GrandPre