College One: Blog Focus- Organisations and getting involved...

The brief for DACA was broad, it seemed that Louise was open to any suggestions as long as that it would help and interest the students. It was clear from the College One's brief that a workshop had to be involved at some point, whether it was an individual workshop or a group one. We all started off considering individual workshops but I think we decided to do a group workshop so that the overall workshop idea could be bigger. The overall idea stemmed from Rory's individual idea of making paints but everyone in the group was interested and involved mark-making in their individual workshops so it was clear that mark-making would be a prominent idea in the group workshop.

It was 10 'teachers' with a class of 15 students so we was aware that there was enough of us to run a workshop this big. We will be working in the same group each week but the class group and size will vary, we will also change roles each week, so that everyone will get the chance to present the PowerPoint and work at the other stations more. If in the other sessions the group size will be bigger, we would need to have objects/materials to blend, more cups and maybe more equipment such as: scissors, hammers and rolling pins. This was a Year 7 group and there attention span near to the end lapsed, if it was an older group I think there attention span would work fine for our original time-plan of the day, if it is another Year 7 class, I would shorten the length of time to fill and hang the balloons and ask for feedback directly from the children instead.

My first impressions of working at the school was that I found it over-whelming working with different age ranges but I also find this same aspect exciting because what I did during the day with these groups changes. I consider the older classes to be more grateful for our help but they would not ask for it, we had to approach them, doing this regularly helps me build on my confidence and as each day goes by at the school, I can feel my confidence growing. Younger classes want more interaction, they would shout me over, ask me  how to do things and to show them how, this for me is encouraging. I enjoy working with Year 9+ because I know I am helping them and they are becoming informed but working with Year 7's is more interesting and rewarding because I feel like they could benefit from my experiences more.