Community Arts in the High Peak
WEEK 1 – June 8th
Here we are at the beginning of our World Artists for World Kindness Day Project with artist Amanda Whewell.
We start with activities inspired by Sonia Delaunay from Russia. Activity sheet PDFs are available below and here is a short film demonstrating the activities!
Sonia Delaunay from Russia, 1885 – 1979 (Click for PDF!)
Enjoy!
Next week, Paul Klee.
May 29th, and it’s hotter than Rome in the High Peak, so don’t forget your sunscreen as you enjoy our fifth installment of fun creative activities for families with young children from Karl, Frances & Margit our Early Years specialists – something to explore together during these extraordinary times!
This week our Family Fun Friday activity is Bookmaking!!
For our final activity we’re showing you how to make a simple book with craft items that you might find around the house. The original project first took the children through the language of books –
author, illustrator, front, back, spine
– and ended in them creating their own book to share with others.
Depending on the age-range we made various types of book but the zig-zag style, with it’s simple concertina fold, is by far the easiest to make and can easily be enjoyed by everyone.
If you have any rubber stamps or home printing kits in the cupboards then now’s the time to dig them out but not essential – pens, pencils, crayons, stickers, collage and any craft items can all used on their own.
To celebrate completing the books we made reading dens with the children so that they could enjoy them alongside a variety of favourite commercial books from the classroom book corner. Some of our dens were in cosy areas indoors and a few were even created in exciting locations outdoors. We hope that you’ve enjoyed our online version of the For the Love of Books project and we really look forward to working with you on our new Early Years and Families book making project when the time comes.
And here are Margit’s activity cards:
As always our Family Fun Friday activities were originally designed for young children and their families but they can easily be undertaken by all the household during the lockdown. Let us know how you get on with BOOKMAKING!
We hope that you’ve enjoyed our online version of the For the Love of Books project and we really look forward to working with you on our new Early Years and Families book making project when the time comes.
These activities have been supported by the Ragdoll Foundation.
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 1
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 2
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 3
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 4
Back to glorious sunshine in the High Peak this week. But to help cheer up any dull moments, here is our fourth installment of fun creative activities for families with young children from Karl, Frances & Margit our Early Years specialists – something to explore together during these extraordinary times!
This week our Family Fun Friday activity is Shadow Puppets!
Playing with light and creating shadows at home is one of the simplest and most satisfying creative activities that we can all do. It’s lots of fun and is bursting with open-ended opportunities for children of all ages to explore.
Young children are particularly fascinated with exploring shapes and textures – watch how Frances creates interesting shapes with everyday objects from around the house in our first video.
Older ones enjoy creating characters than can ‘sing’ and ‘dance’ and ‘act’ in their own little performances. This character puppetry performance was undertaken during our original project, so this week we’ve also included the For The Love Of Books film that we made with Mark and Benn from Metro Media at St George’s C of E Primary School in New Mills. The children of the Early Years department at St George’s really enjoyed this activity and we hope that you give it a go at home during these exceptional times and beyond.
And here are Margit’s activity cards:
As always our Family Fun Friday activities were originally designed for young children and their families but they can easily be undertaken by all household members during the lockdown. Let us know how you get on with SHADOW PUPPETS!
These activities have been supported by the Ragdoll Foundation.
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 1
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 2
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 3
We hope you’re recovering from the blast of overnight freezes in the High Peak this week. To help you do that here is our third installment of fun creative activities for families with young children from Karl, Frances & Margit our Early Years specialists – something to explore together during these extraordinary times!
This week our Family Fun Friday activity is Marbling! We’ve adapted the original activity from For the Love of Books to use things found around the home. We were particularly inspired by a book called ‘Space Walk’ by Salina Yoon and in the project we went on to make an interactive creative play space for the children to explore life on another planet.
Marbling is instantly gratifying. Young children gasp and giggle in wonder at the beautiful transformation that occurs to a plain piece of paper as they dip it into the ink tray and adults marvel at the impressive results.
No two pieces of marbled paper are alike and there are lots of things you can make with the end product: bookmarks, greetings cards, backgrounds for further paintings – and, here, an other worldly planet to stick up on your wall or window!
And here are Margit’s activity cards:
As always our Family Fun Friday activities were originally designed for young children and their families but they can easily be undertaken by all household members during the lockdown. Let us know how you get on with Marbling!
These activities have been supported by the Ragdoll Foundation.
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 1
Click here for Family Fun Friday week 2
We bring you some fun creative activities for families with young children from our team of Early Years specialists – something to explore together during these extraordinary times!
Family Fun Fridays will take you on a journey of creating art with nature, marbling paper with items found in your kitchens, explore shadows and shapes, tell stories, make books and more.
We hope that you all keep safe and healthy, entertained and happy!
There will be five activities in total, being released one each Friday in May, starting on Friday 1st May. We had project planned for families this summer, which is now on hold, but get in touch if you want to join us when we can meet again.
There is an activity card to give you ideas and tell you what you need, and a photo card for inspiration, but first watch Frances’ video demo!
These activities have been supported by the Ragdoll Foundation.
For the Love of Books project manager Karl Harris tells us a bit more about designing the activities:
“When it became apparent that we would all be living under various lockdown conditions for some time I called Sophie at HPCA and we decided to put out some activities for people at home at the moment with young children. For the Love of Books is a tried and tested project, so I contacted two of the delivery artists, and we worked together to come up with a special version for these times. For the Love of Books took a series of age-range specific books and produced open-ended and fun creative activities from the content. These activities don’t replicate those sessions exactly but we were very fond of some of the ideas that we had devised so we looked more closely at some of them.”
About the team
Karl Harris, Frances Walker and Margit van der Zwan have worked together for the last three years on our very successful For The Love Of Books project, partnering with nurseries and other early years settings. Karl coordinated the production of the activities and said, “Our original roles and creative delivery skills were all thrown up in the air and Margit the musician became Margit the illustrator, Frances the creative play expert became Frances the video blog presenter, and I tackled my fear of technology head on and learnt how to use a computer far better than I’ve ever done before!”
About the activities
Karl says:
“We’ve designed Family Fun Fridays with activity cards and videos to engage and entertain all members of the household. Activities are open-ended, using items that can easily be found around the house and garden – or on your daily exercise outdoors. We want to big up our beautiful High Peak flora and fauna, and appreciate how the natural world can nurture the creativity and wellbeing of a new generation.
You won’t find any colouring-in sheets or word searches here but we will instead be taking you on a journey of creating art with nature, marbling paper with items found in your kitchens, explore shadows and shapes, tell stories, make books and more. We hope that you all keep safe and healthy, entertained and happy, and we really look forward to working with you all again on a new project that was originally scheduled for this summer but is now on hold for the time when we can meet again.”
Karl Harris | Margit van der Zwan | Frances Walker
We are thinking about different points of view on our natural world and the changes that we see, that we don’t see and that we’d like to see!
Over the next 13 weeks we will run workshops twice a week:
Mondays from 4th May; 6pm – 8pm
Wednesdays from 6th May; 3pm – 5pm
We aren’t tied to our own towns any more, so you can sign up for either session, but there will be limited places on each SO YOU HAVE TO SIGN UP.
Bear in mind:
If there are spare places you can come to both sessions.
Weeks 1 – 4: Generating ideas (a bit like we used to do at the Young Writers’ Camp) and getting used to working online & finding out what people want.
Weeks 5 – 13: Focusing on skills and choosing things to work on. These sessions could include song writing, script writing, online music, filming, art, instrumental tuition – give us ideas in the first 4 weeks and we will plan from there.
Summer School??
At this point we have no idea if we can run a ‘normal’ Summer School, so we are keeping an open mind. We may be able to meet for workshops, but not open a show to an audience. We may be out of lockdown, or still living with bits of it – we will have to think creatively to work out what this year’s ‘show’ will look like…
If you didn’t come the taster session on Friday 17th April you will need to sign up to our online workshop guidelines before you can join the project. Click here to see the guidelines.
Also click here to see the video from last year’s Come Here, Stratosphere!
Big thanks to Deb from The Cultural Sisters who has sent these lovely videos on pompom making.
Grab your wool, your cardboard and scissors or your pompom maker if you’ve got one, and enjoy these expert instructions:
Staying safe online
Because this is a new way of working we have thought carefully about a new set of guidelines / ground rules to make sure these online spaces are just as safe as the physical spaces where we normally meet.
This is all new to us – so if you have any thoughts, worries or ideas please get in touch so we can work this out together!
Also click here to see our full safeguarding policy and guidelines.
The challenges
Collaborating online will be harder than working face-to-face. Georgia told me that when she has used Skype before to connect with friends if there are too many people everyone just talks over each other and quieter people don’t get heard.
We will all have to be (even more!) disciplined when connecting online to make sure everyone gets a say.
We will start with smaller group sizes and shorter sessions to gather information about what works and what is difficult.
This will only work if people keep to their time slots. Again, more discipline!
We are refining our rules for how our staff and freelancers can connect with young people online. We don’t want you to have bad experiences on there through having learned about it with us. So we have come up with some guidelines which we hope will prevent that.
The Guidelines for young people
Signing up:
Preparing to take part:
During sessions:
After sessions:
Our two main projects which we are re-launching remotely are: Film Cuts Club and Tall Tales. All current participants are welcome to take part in either or both – Some people already take part in both.
We will be using online tools to keep connected and we are keen to keep people working together / collaborating – because the work we make together is ‘greater than the sum of its parts’, it’s a kind of chemical reaction, like alchemy!
Tools
I will sign up each young person for online sessions through a parent or guardian who will have to speak to me directly to give consent for you taking part, and confirm an email address to link to.
To take part in sessions you will need:
Essential:
Bonus extras:
We are going to start sessions using Zoom – group video app:
If anyone has heard about security concerns for Zoom – we are keeping track of this story and would definitely prefer not to change to a different provider. Click here to read an article about what Zoom are doing to improve security.
We are also using a website called Miro – which is like an online whiteboard, and we will use this to replace the physical ‘project box’ where we store everyone’s work.
All the tools we have chosen are FREE, but they do have ‘pay for’ options, so if you accidentally find yourself at a pay wall just cancel and go back to the free version.