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Week 6

Our last week of the expressive arts and culture module we went a trip to Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. Kelvingrove is one of 20 museums in Glasgow and is one of Scotlands most popular free attraction.

I gained a lot of knowledge from this trip for a future teacher. Before I always thought school trips would be expensive but for schools outside Glasgow it would cost around £20.  As a future teacher I feel it would be important to build positive relationships with local museums as it is a worthwhile learning experience and may be the only time children will get this experience will be through their primary school.

Our task in the museum was to choose a topic and take ten pictures throughout the museum. I chose family and love as my theme – which represents my evocative object.

Below are the ten images I took – there is a mixture between mothers and children, friends, marriage and religion. I have a range of different images from different galleries in the museum – I have taken picture of statues, ornaments, paintings and photographs which all share the common theme.

The love between a mother and child.
A statue showing the bond between father and child.
A picture of Jesus Christ, who died for his people.
Showing the love between two friends.
A memorial of marriage.
Love between animals.
Mary Queen of Scots was killed because of her religion.
A picture of a young girl choosing who she will love.
The statue shows a connection between two people.
Live happily ever after.

At the beginning I found this difficult to find what I was looking for, the museum has twenty-two galleries it was difficult to choose what galleries to go to that will have the images I’m looking for in a short space of time.

As a whole, I really enjoyed the trip to the museum and is somewhere I would visit with children in my class in the future. It is important for children to embrace culture and have the opportunity to visit museums and art galleries.

 

Week 5

This week we used our sixty two words, that we were asked to think of at the beginning of the module relating to our evocative object, to create a  concrete poem.

A concrete poem is when the poets message is shown through an image rather than the words themselves. This is a contemporary way of writing poetry.

I found this challenging to think of the sixty two words at the beginning and then to think outside the box to convey the message through a visual image rather than through the sixty two words.

In the end I decided to write in black on black paper and choose three words than were the most meaningful to me and the other words written around those three important words. I chose the colour black as it commonly seen as a colour of death. I also liked the subtlety of the words around the other ones which would mean someone reading my poem would need to look closely at each of the words. Below is a picture of the poem I created.

The three words I chose were – irreplaceable, lucky and priceless. I choose these words because the ring can not be replaced, I am lucky to have had an important person in my life for so long and be given a sentimental part of her and the rings are special I could not put a price on them.

This is an idea I would take to a future classroom as it is encorporating different areas of the curriculum – literacy and art. The children would need to create a poem with their sixty two words and think of an object they could draw to reflect their evocative object and poem they created.

Week 4

This week in the expressive arts and culture module we focused on creating sound scapes. I really enjoyed this lesson and would be an idea to create different sound scapes with children in my future career.

Sound scapes is an easy activity to plan and is child led rather than teacher led. Another positive to creating a sound scape is that it is a cross-curricular activity – music, art, literacy and HWB. The sound scape can link to lots of topics in the class and can be created with the inter-disciplinary topic of the term.

Firstly, we created a sound scape as a class relating to fireworks. We were asked to think of words associated with fireworks and then create different sounds to match the word. My partner and I were to create a sound for talking- our idea was to video the class talking and use this as our sound.

The main part of the workshop was to create our own sound scape in a group relating to any topic. My class on placement are learning about the rainforest – this may be an idea I would take forward to use in my placement. We thought of different sounds we would hear in the rainforest and what instruments would create a similar sound.

Below is a picture of our sound scape and a video of what our sound scape sounded like. Funnily enough, one of the sounds created was by one of the girls in my group laughing however it sounds like an animal you could maybe hear in the rainforest!

 

 

It was interesting listening to the other groups in the class and what topic they chose – some of my peers are extremely musical and creative and this was made clear with the sound scape they created.

As a whole, this was a beneficial workshop as it provided me with an interesting lesson idea I could take forward in my own practice.

 

Week 3

This week we took the importance of music a step further. Although, it was not directly linked to our evocative objects, the task was to think of two contrasting songs and discuss your choice of songs to the rest of the class. We then created a game in the class ‘ delve or share’. The class listened to my choice of songs and then they had to delve and think of why I chose the songs I did. If we did not want the class to delve we could share the information to them.

My choice of songs was a song I liked and a song I disliked. I chose ‘Believe’ by Cher and ‘A little Respect’ by Erasure. My favourite song is ‘Believe’ so that is why I chose that song, it is also a song that I want played at my funeral so has some positive and negative emotions. ‘A little respect’ is a song I have never enjoyed listening to, mainly as it reminds me of a certain person who is no longer part of my life.

I enjoyed listening to my peers choice of songs, as it was interesting to see their body language change when listening to their contrasting songs. Most of the class, when listening to a song they disliked they became tense and wanted the song off quickly in comparison to a song they liked most of the class seemed to justify or apologise for their song choice.

The next part of the module consisted of watching videos relating to why music is important in movies and tv programmes. The part I found the most interesting was that it is not the scene that causes emotions of sadness, happiness or fear it is the music choice that helps create the desired emotion.  Pixar are extremely good at this and the video below explains how well they do this.

We were then asked to create our own movie soundtrack – to change the feeling of the scene. Below are the two soundtracks I chose to show how music can change a scene of a movie.

 

Week 2

This weeks task revolved around our evocative object but in another way. Rather than expressing our feelings and emotions through words, we were to create our own piece of music relating to our evocative object.

As previously mentioned, my evocative object was my granny’s weddings rings. As the rings are symbolic of love I wanted to have some church chimes throughout the song. My granny and grandpa were married in a church so I felt this represented the rings well. I used the emotions I felt to try and think of other musical instruments that I could hear when I looked at the wedding rings.

Although, the rings have some sad elements I wanted my piece of music to sound happy and upbeat. We used an app called Garage Band to compose our piece of music.

Below is the piece of music I created.

This would interesting to do with children, often children would struggle to express their emotions in words so to do this through composing music is another way of using arts through-out the curriculum. Music is beneficial to children in a number of ways;  it can  help sharpen student attentiveness, strengthen perseverance, equip students to be creative and support better study habits and self esteem. It has been found that pupils who are interested in music and play a musical instrumental are the most likely group to be admitted to a medical school (Arts Education Partnership, 2011).

Furthermore, children would be developing many skills as well as being able to communicate their feelings in another way.

Week 1

In the first week of our Expressive Arts and Culture module we were thinking about evocative objects. An evocative object is “an everyday object becoming part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within” according to Turkle (2011).

I had never thought that an object could be evocative until now but since this workshop I have had a think about other every day objects I know are special to me but had never thought about the emotions that I feel.

The object I brought to class was my Granny’s weddings rings I was given after she passed away. It evoked a lot of emotion as it was a year since she passed this week so I was thinking a lot about her. The rings are not something I wear everyday but I see them everyday when I look in my jewellery box. Whenever I see them I think about how special she was to me and I reminisce of the memories I have. ,

 

Although, I was anxious and felt a little upset when I had to speak to my peers about my evocative object in hindsight it was an interesting task to do and also to hear about my peers objects and what their objects meant to them. Although, some people had similar objects they all had a different meaning and were special in different ways.

This would be an interesting activity to do with children during circle time. I would allow each child in the class a minute to speak about their evocative object, this may be too long for early level children, but would be interesting to do with children in middle-upper primary.

Our task for next was to think of sixty-two words that links to our evocative object which will then be created into a concrete poem. I felt this task was challenging to think of words to describe an object that was very personal to me. Below is a video of my saying the sixty-two words I chose to describe my evocative object.

 

Reference:

Turkle, S. (2011). Evocative objects. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.