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Collaborative creation, Charmaine Suri
Collaborative creation Charmaine Suri unveils an eye-catching project
Every year, our PYP Visual Art students are all abuzz about embarking on their last unit – How We Organize Ourselves: Art as a visual language. Our central idea is ‘Our creativity, skills and knowledge enable us to make significant contributions to community events’. It’s the time of the year when everyone involved in the PYP comes together for the end-of-year performance and the Visual Art students design and create the backdrop. Every child in the PYP has a role to play in displaying the skills and the knowledge they have gained throughout the year. The end product: a humongous 30 x 12 feet backdrop custom-designed for each production. The process: All classes watch the movie (if there is one), read the script/story and talk about characters, settings and scenes. Then each child draws and colours a sketch of what they would like the backdrop to look like. Every class votes for the one they like best from their class. Later they vote once again for the one they like best from all of those chosen. This design is then printed in black and white on a giant flex. This takes about 2 weeks.
During their Visual Art classes over the next four weeks, all classes work on a part of the backdrop using their particular area of expertise – whether roller painting, collage, sponge printing, tribal art, and so on. We start each class by looking at the backdrop critically together and discussing what we can work on to enhance it. We end the class with a discussion on the attributes of the IB learner profile and attitudes used that day.
It’s a mammoth collaborative effort and all of us heave a sigh of satisfaction and relief when it is completed – only to look forward to starting afresh next year!
