Room 13 is an art project which focuses on artwork created by children. This project was introduced in 1994 and involves child and adult artists working together to produce artwork. It has branches not only in Scotland but also in  London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, South Africa, India and Nepal. “Room 13 provides a continuum that works across the academic spectrum, embracing learners of all ages and abilities and linking school, art, learning and life. It achieves this not by undermining or offering opposition to conventional teaching practice or existing curriculum, but by supplementing it in a way that
adds value.”(Gibb, 2012, page 244)

Visual arts

I found both of today’s workshops to be highly interactive and interesting. The first workshop I took part in was Visual arts. During this workshop, I was involved in creating a paintbrush using different materials such as a twig, feathers and wool.

The following pictures shows how my paintbrush turned out to be.

 

In my opinion, creating a paintbrush before making a painting was a very good idea. It was an exciting experience which I would definitely make use of in a classroom setting. Creating my own paintbrush enabled me to be more creative as the marks that I was making was very different to what it would have been with a regular paintbrush bought from the shop.

After creating the paintbrush, i made a paint pallet using white paper and used 4 different colours (red, white, yellow and blue) to create various colours which i might need for my painting.

The above is a picture of the pallet I used. Using only four different colours, I created many more.

The painting that I created was described verbally by the lecturer and therefore it was very different from what other people within the classroom had created. I feel this is mainly because we all think and view things differently.

The same verbal instruction was given to everyone in the class. although there were similarities between the paintings, they all looked very different.

 

Painting which I created.

 

Paintings created by different people within the class. 

Music

The 2nd workshop was music where I learned another way of playing and teaching glockenspiels : Using figure notes instead of conventional notation.

 

We got the opportunity to play three different musics: Jingle bells, twinke twinkle little star, and Frere jacques. The figure notes for all three of the musics is shown in the picture above.  I found it easier to play with the figure notes compared to conventional notation and I feel that children at an early stage would also find playing music using figure notes much more easier and enjoyable than using conventional notation.

After this activity, we improvised our own music using the only 5 of the notes: C,D,E,G,A (represented by figurative notes).  From doing this activity i learned that anyone can create music.

References

Gibb, C. (2012) Room 13: The Movement and International Network. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 31(3), pp.237-244.