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I've started teaching 'art' to Junior and Senior Infants (ages 4-6) as part of an after school program in a local National School. It’s nice to be working weekly with a group of children again.

Art-Youth-Culture: FYI

A meeting of young people and policy makers

27 -29 March 2010

Are you between the ages of 15 and 23?
 
The Arts Council is interested in hearing your views about young people’s participation in cultural life and the arts.
 
Art-Youth-Culture: FYI will be held over three days in Dublin. It will involve a series of arts-based workshops and discussions, concluding with a meeting between young people, arts policy makers, and government representatives. 

The first online reading room was held on February 11th and 1.00pm.
It’s very exciting for us here at Practice.ie to be able to create a space for like minded people to communicate and discuss topics relevant to our work and lives. You can be anywhere, one attendee was participating from a train, Amazing!

At the start of the meeting I asked each person to use a few words to describe what they do.

Session one attendees:

1.    Ann Henderson: artist - process- the environment - people

Creativity in the Classroom  has been shortlisted for the AIB Better Ireland Awards. We need your votes to get €5,000 first prize to keep the project going.

For more information on the project  www.creativityintheclassroom.ie

To vote by text; text CRUMRD followed by a space, followed by C to 51303 (standard SMS rates apply).

to vote online; click on www.betterireland.ie, select Crumlin Road branch and choose your group.

The position paper 'Defining and negotiating the artist's role when working with children and young people' was drawn up following a Practice.ie meeting at the National Concert Hall, in association with dlr Arts Office in which artists considered the following 3 questions in discussion groups:

How do we define ourselves?/ How do we articulate the value of what we do?

How do we document, extend and promote our work?

Considering new approaches/ What we do and how we're doing it?

The last day on the puppet portal, we made baby turtles in expectance of the turning turtles show. Orla came down and made puppets and video ed the making. We started with two children but in the end we had seven. After we had made the turtles the children made one of the tables into turtle island, they drew pam trees, sand and other island creatures.

During our last Practice.ie meeting in partnership with the dlr Arts Office at the National Concert Hall. We asked all the artists to make artist books as a way to gather their thoughts throughout the day. After the day I read through the books and I brought together some of the thoughts that artists noted down that I thought would be good to share.

 Please comment if you have any tips to add.

Last Wednesday was the final contact day of the Puppet Portal Project. Final project day though is an evaluation meeting with all involved, this week Wednesday.

I moved to friday this week, are theme was fire but when i went in i found out that the school was doing a project on irish aid and hunger so we combined the two, the sun was the fire and we also had a horse called fire with fire feather hair. It was my smallest group so far with two children, a third came in at the end but for a few minutes.

Still due to infection control the classroom was closed for children. I had thought of & prepared ways to still involve children in a collaborative action of art making- keeping in mind that I need the full support of the teachers who see the children on the wards.