I have been wanting to create an art and craft blog for a few months now, and tonight seemed like as good a time as any to get started.
For the past four and a half months, I've been teaching "drawing" to grade 1, 2 and 3 students at a primary (elementary) school in Hungary. As far as I can tell, these "drawing" classes are not supposed to be particularly technical - they are more like craft sessions which are taught in English. I'm quite relieved about this as I have no formal art training and my drawing ability never really matured much beyond stick figures. In addition to the "drawing" classes which I teach, most of the kids also have graphics (grafika) classes in Hungarian where they learn proper art stuff (like how to draw a face with the correct proportions, colour theory and shading techniques, etc).
The main idea behind the "drawing" classes seems to be for the kids to get used to listening to and understanding instructions in English. The secondary focus is helping the kids to pick up a few new English words. And, of course, the third focus is having fun and making something cool.
Teaching "drawing" to the kids has been quite challenging so far. In addition to the language barrier, the limited amount of time allocated to each class also poses problems. Each "drawing" class is only 40 minutes long - which really isn't that much time to explain and demonstrate the activity in English, get 20 kids to complete it and then get them all packed up and ready for the next class.
Another challenge is the lack of resources. The kids have colour pencils, tempera paints, crayons, scissors, glue, ordinary A4 paper and that's about it. This seems a far cry from the art classes that I remember attending in primary school where we had loads of cool craft supplies. Things like googly eyes, glitter, ribbons, clay and coloured cardboard were always readily available - not the case here unfortunately! We do try to buy the kids more interesting supplies, but we can't afford to do that all the time. And I hate to ask the school to buy them as I know they don't have a lot of money to splash around.
Anyway, it is my hope that this blog will provide a source of simple, cheap and quick art and craft activities that can be taught using limited English.
- Amanda
For the past four and a half months, I've been teaching "drawing" to grade 1, 2 and 3 students at a primary (elementary) school in Hungary. As far as I can tell, these "drawing" classes are not supposed to be particularly technical - they are more like craft sessions which are taught in English. I'm quite relieved about this as I have no formal art training and my drawing ability never really matured much beyond stick figures. In addition to the "drawing" classes which I teach, most of the kids also have graphics (grafika) classes in Hungarian where they learn proper art stuff (like how to draw a face with the correct proportions, colour theory and shading techniques, etc).
The main idea behind the "drawing" classes seems to be for the kids to get used to listening to and understanding instructions in English. The secondary focus is helping the kids to pick up a few new English words. And, of course, the third focus is having fun and making something cool.
Teaching "drawing" to the kids has been quite challenging so far. In addition to the language barrier, the limited amount of time allocated to each class also poses problems. Each "drawing" class is only 40 minutes long - which really isn't that much time to explain and demonstrate the activity in English, get 20 kids to complete it and then get them all packed up and ready for the next class.
Another challenge is the lack of resources. The kids have colour pencils, tempera paints, crayons, scissors, glue, ordinary A4 paper and that's about it. This seems a far cry from the art classes that I remember attending in primary school where we had loads of cool craft supplies. Things like googly eyes, glitter, ribbons, clay and coloured cardboard were always readily available - not the case here unfortunately! We do try to buy the kids more interesting supplies, but we can't afford to do that all the time. And I hate to ask the school to buy them as I know they don't have a lot of money to splash around.
Anyway, it is my hope that this blog will provide a source of simple, cheap and quick art and craft activities that can be taught using limited English.
- Amanda
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