The stunning colours of
autumn are all around and it always feels vital to celebrate this and explore
all the colours whilst the leaves are in abundance in all their glory (it doesn’t
take long for them to be whisked away by the wind).
I’ve used autumn leaves with
children in many ways and am constantly inspired by the descriptions and
delights children find in them. We
spent a long time at Dunkirk this week with the reception classes looking at a
collection of leaves – the children wanted to look really closely and were so
eager to share the things they noticed.
They were really interested in the names of the
different leaves and recognised the leaves from the familiar trees around
school and the local area. Some of the
children really were gripped by this and spent ages learning the names of
different leaves and then sharing their knowledge with others, they were
repeating words such as “sycamore”, “rowan” and “lime-tree” over and over in a
sing-song way.
They felt all the textures
of the leaves, they were intrigued by all the vast colours and spent a long
time colour matching the leaves with paint-charts. They put the leaves on the light-box, they made leaf rubbings… Everything had a story
attached to it and I loved the qualities they found in the leaves and twigs as
they told me their ideas. A leaf could
be bed for an ant, or a pathway to a castle or a balloon or a boat…
They looked at images of
creations by artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Mark Pouyet and were really
keen to make their own patterns, lines, marks, arrangements and images.
It’s really interesting to see what grabs the
attention of different children. Some
were interested in the textures of the leaves and wanted to tear the leaves
into smaller pieces to explore this and then arrange patterns with the small
pieces; some children made three-dimensional work with leaves and seed-heads
piled together. Some children were fascinated
by the leaves falling and floating and wanted to watch them flutter over and
over. Some children only wanted to use
the stems and twigs; some were intrigued by the way the stems rolled and wanted
to use sticks, logs and pine-cones to make towers and castles.
Much of this is all part of
trying to slow down and really look in detail at the world around us with
children. Children have vast capacity
to notice amazing detail and to share this if they have listening ears around
them. This all links to development of
communication and language and it needs to be a gentle and slow process. If things are to have real meaning for
children and to stay in their memory, then they need to happen in the
time-frame of the child – and often this takes a lot of time. Children want to really examine things and
they frequently see things that an adult doesn’t.
I use this quote a lot, from
the wonderful Ursula Kolbe, I think it sums up so well the need for adults to
make time to slow down and really look with children:
“… the visual arts are not
only about making things with materials: they begin with looking and
touching. Sometimes we simply need to
slow down and look intently at things with children – movements of creatures,
the gleam of colours in a shell or in the grains of sand trickling through
fingers, a favourite picture book…” Ursula Kolbe
