Art is an amazing way of engaging our students in various issues that concern us now.
At One In A Million (OIAM) school in Bradford, we used the art enrichment sessions to look at the work that Be One Percent are supporting in Malawi. Mary’s Meals.
Mary’s Meals is an international movement that sets up school feeding projects in communities where poverty and hunger prevent children from gaining an education. The charity now feeds more than 1.1 million children every school day. Be One Percent sponsored its first school with Mary’s Meals in 2011 and with our fundraising success it now sponsors 4 schools in Malawi and Liberia.
The students quickly grasped the vision of Mary’s Meals by reading the information on the website and selecting the best images to incorporate within the artwork. We used these as inspiration to come up with our own pieces of art using acrylic paint on primed MDF boards.Primed MDF boards - the bank canvas!
Clockwise from top left image:
The images we printed off the Mary’s Meals website.
The Primed Boards.
Acrylic Paint.
Clever makeshift palettes using cardboard covered in clingfilm.
Cutting and sticking to create our ideas montages.
The Drawing Stage. Transferring ideas on to the boards.
The Painting Stage.
The finished pieces are an instant reminder for the students of the issues that face some people in our world today. The artwork gives the students a connection to the facts that they have learned and incorporated within their work.
This is a very powerful way of learning, especially for those students who maybe struggle with the more traditional models for learning which are practiced in our schools.
If you would like to find out more about:
Be One Percent, www.beonepercent.org
Art Workshops, www.canpaint.org
