Throughout this weeks, visual art input and drama input we were looking at real life prompts which we could visualise through our own experiences and how we feel and have felt about certain personal and historical experiences.

This week’s visual arts started off by making our own paint brushes using unconventional materials. The unconventional materials included branches that could be used as either brissles or as the handle of the paintbrush itself. We had creative freedom of how we wanted our paintbrush to look but also paint. When we were using our paintbrush to paint, a picture was described to us that we could interpret to our own way that we want the picture to look. In a classroom this would allow the children to have creative freedom but also allow the children to have their own aspect of creative freedom.

This week’s drama input consisted of us using previous conventions that we had learned and use them to show our emotions about real life events. This was a clear link to our art workshop that we were expressing a past experience through our artwork that was being described to us. Drama this week was clearly very emotional as we were touching on subjects such as the holocaust that many people like myself are passionate about in the class. Drama also allowed us to explore our emotions deeper to see both how we would feel in a situation similar to the holocaust without actually experiencing it. Through the use of our stimulus we were able to use our improvisation skills that we have developed in previous weeks in order to use our raw emotion to showcase our feelings to the pictures of the holocaust. This week’s drama workshop highlighted the importance of showing our emotions but also using our own personal experience to draw on the emotions that are highly beneficial to a drama lesson.

Both our workshops this week explored how we use our emotions and past experiences to show what we feel about our own past

experiences and past historical experiences that we may know a fair amount about, or we may know nothing about it. This week showed me, that we as teachers need to be able to draw on our own personal emotions to be able to connect with our class and also engage them in every opportunity that arises. This means that If the children aren’t able to engage with the subject that is being taught, they are able to engage and connect to the teacher’s emotions, so they have some understanding about the subject that is being taught.