Blog 4 – Third Class Pupils, Scoil Mhichil Naofa, Co. Kildare

The following blog posts have been written by 14 third class students from Scoil Mhichil Naofa, Athy, Co. Kildare. They have been partaking in a Teacher–Artist Partnership (TAP) project since March 2021 with the help of artist Tunde Toth and class teacher Ms. Hourigan. The theme of their project is ‘Place’ with a focus on nature and the local environment. The children are very excited to share their perspective with you on how they have been progressing. Thank you all for reading and we hope you enjoy!

The project is one of the recipients of the 2021 Portal Documentation Award read the announcement here.

Mapping Outside 

We went outside straight away to do some artwork. Tunde gave us a clipboard with two sheets of paper and explained what to do. Firstly we had to draw a bird’s eye view map of the school yard. Secondly we worked in pairs to use a view finder to find an interesting spot to draw. This was tricky as if you were holding the view finder you had to be still, our yard is quite big so it was hard to choose which area to map.

While we were outside, the portal filming crew called us in pairs to a quiet area to do an interview. We were asked questions like

“What was your favourite part?”

“What do you think art is?”

“What was hard about the artwork?”

“Can you tell us about Tunde?”

The interview’s were fun to do but at first it was a little awkward. It was our first time being interviewed so we were a little nervous but we really enjoyed talking about all the work we did this year.

Plaster

We collected materials outside to use to make prints. We collected things like sticks, leaves, flowers, feathers, twigs, grass ETC to put in. We mixed flour, hot water and cold water to make a plaster mixture. We all had a turn stirring the mixture. We poured the mixture into containers. We placed the materials we gathered outside into the containers and we left them to dry. We wanted this plaster to set and go hard so we could use it as a plate for printing, however, when we came back to class after the weekend, our plaster had stunk up the whole class. Unfortunately our plaster had not worked. We think we may have overfilled the containers or maybe used too much liquid. They never hardened and we couldn’t use them. If we were to try this again, next time we could; make the mixture differently and pour less into the containers, or use clay or plaster of paris instead.

Bridges

Our task was to make a bridge that connected or combined something in nature with something man-made. We were given a few materials to construct our bridges with – blue paper, skewers, straws and masking tape. We worked in small groups to make our bridges. We found it tricky to find a place to make our bridge as we had to find somewhere outside that had nature and man-made items. We enjoyed this activity as the materials were easy to use and we enjoyed being out in the sunshine working with our friends.

Recording our reflections

In class, we made a scrapbook to talk about the lessons we did with Tunde and Ms. Hourigan. We stuck in pictures from our lessons, art we made during our virtual, we wrote recounts about our sessions and we were able to write our thoughts and feelings about art in here also.

By Artur, Sochi, Katie and Renata