Last week in our integrated arts module we designed our own paintbrushes. This allowed us to be creative and explore different patterns and brush strokes with our own designs. Creativity is an important skill which children and young people should be encouraged to explore. Education Scotland (2013) states that “Creativity skills help children and young people not just to understand their world, but be sufficiently equipped to influence its shape and to exercise control over their interactions with it”.

Also by designing our own with materials such as wool, paperclips, feathers etc. We felt less inclined to compare our work with others as we had created the paintbrushes ourselves. After spending some time creating our paintbrushes, our lecturer described a Scottish landscape and we had to paint, with our own brushes, what had been conveyed to us using only the three primary colours -blue, red and yellow- and white. Just as there were no two paintbrushes the same, everyone’s final piece was also different including brushstrokes and colour. This was an extremely fun and relevant class as art has always been a large part of my own school experience and I thoroughly enjoyed this workshop.

In the second workshop we were looking at figurenotes in music. This allows children to participate in music whether they have experience or talent or not. This way of learning standard notation can be learnt instantly and increase confidence and motivation.

I found this workshop particularly helpful as I find music more difficult than art. Both workshops were extremely interactive and displayed individuality and creativeness and would be good lessons which can also be used in a primary school setting

References

Education Scotland. (2013) Creativity Across learning 3-18 [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Documents/Creativity/CRE1_WhatAreCreativitySkills/Creativity3to18.pdf [Accessed: 2 October 2017]