Workshops Week 2
The Sandy Lane workshops moved on apace last week - four in the space of two days!
Monday 25th saw us at St Richard's Primary in the morning and West Lancashire High School in the afternoon.
The following day we were back at St Richard's in the afternoon and in the morning we started our workshops at Park Children's Centre with the Busy Bodies playgroup - a parent and toddler drop-in group, ran expertly by Kerry and the rest of the staff.
I've attached a few pics below of the activities from the sessions and I'll explain what's going on.
Firstly: 'Mix and Match':
This is an activity to get groups in the mood and start to unlock those creative ideas bursting to get out.
Pupils line up and pick three different prompt words out of three envelopes, lucky dip style. They then have to combine the three random words into one image. We show and do an example or two to demonstrate. An example might be something like the words 'jelly' and 'moon' - so you might draw a picture of an astronaut bouncing on top of a giant jelly. Of course, this is probably best explained by the pictures below!
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| The Mix and Match Envelopes |
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| Sausage, tentacles and turning purple. I think the student has more than hit the brief. |
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| Particularly pleased with the 'burger shoes' here |
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| 'World's fastest tap dancing worms' |
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| Cute sandwich, the size of a mountain and exploding. |
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| Collecting mice, sparkily spangles, and gingerbread rabbit |
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| Stripy tail, mouse and stretched. |
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| Exploding, birthday present and bird beak. |
Workshop Theme 2
As we have a secret garden theme coalescing at Sandy Lane, the flowers we've chosen are traditional english garden flowers - crocuses, pansies, roses, bluebells and geraniums.
The heritage inspirations came from our meeting with Chris from the Skelmersdale Heritage Society. Chris has an enormous amount of photographs depicting scenes of Sandy Lane from the last century - Ice cream carts, the Skelmersdale brass band, the Skem jazzer, Lamb's chemist and various shops and scenes from a forgotten era.
A great starting point for our 'shrinkies' and I'm hoping some of the participants will know a little more about the area and its history as we journey through the workshops.
At this point you may or may not be thinking 'yep, that all sounds good but what on earth are 'shrinkies'?'
Ok it's definitely time to explain myself:
Firstly we take an inspiring picture - a picture of the Skelmersdale brass band for example, then we do a drawing of maybe a trumpet or a trombone on a piece of A5. Then, we trace over the picture with our magical 'shrinkie' sheet -shrinkie sheet is made of plastic and usually comes in A4 sizes with one side frosted so that you can draw and colour on that side- when the image is finished we can cut it out and then, either by popping it in the oven or using a heat gun, shrink the plastic to make a nice, decorative memento.
Time for some pictures to give my wooly explanations some heft!
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| Inspiring picture selection |
Selected inspiring picture - in this case, a horse-drawn ice cream cart
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| Drawing of the cart alongside the finished shrinkie. |
The shrinking process
Hopefully that clears a few things up on this 'shrinkie' business.
Our thanks again to last week's workshop participants; West Lancashire High School, St Richard's primary school and Busy Bodies playgroup at The Park Children's Centre.
