Kornmehl
Terry Aizen – Director of Kornmehl
The language of Visual Arts
Working collaboratively and Aboriginal Culture – Part 2
At Kornmehl we believe in the importance of building respectful and positive relationships. To build positive relationships with others, children need to develop ‘social competence’ and the ability to interact with others with care, empathy and respect. Social competence is the foundation that allows children to understand and self-regulate their own emotions and negotiate their interactions with others. One of the ways we promote social and emotional competence and encourage prosocial behaviours at Pre-school, is by planning, providing and inviting children to engage in small group collaborative experiences.
At Kornmehl, we want the children to be aware of and develop an understanding of Aboriginal culture and heritage and include Aboriginal perspectives into our program. Some of the ways we have been doing this is through discussions, reading stories and Acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the Land.
In fact, we begin our morning meetings by saying Acknowledgement to Country. We often have discussions about this, revisiting prior knowledge and information, as well as sharing new information as it arises. For example, we talk about why the Aboriginal people needed to take care of the land in order to survive. They needed the land as a source of food and shelter. We have explained to the children how knowledgeable Aboriginal people were, and still are, about what plants/berries were safe to eat and ones that weren’t. Plants and leaves were used for medicine too.
We looked closely at Aboriginal art and how the artists used art elements and symbols to represent an idea or tell a story. We learnt that Aboriginal people didn’t have a written language like us and one way they told stories was through art.
At morning meeting the Starfish children were shown a YouTube clip featuring an artist, Judy Watson Napangardi. The clip showed her painting on a large-scale canvas. It detailed her journey of her work, showing how she drew the outline of her story and then filled it in with a myriad of colours and carefully executed patterns. The videos were very inspirational and during the viewing the children added their impressions of what they were seeing “It looks like a rainbow, swirls, lots of dots”.
During this art study, as Early Childhood educators, we have been aiming to:
- Develop an understanding and appreciation of art from another culture, in particular Aboriginal culture.
- Encourage children to look closely and notice detail.
- Provide opportunities for collaboration and feedback from peers and educators as they select resources and develop techniques.
During indoor learning time, materials were set up in a way to invite a collaborative art experience, where a small group of artists were invited to embark on a creative art piece while sitting on the floor using paints. At times there was silence and deep concentration and at other times some were excited to share their marks and contributions e.g Daniel: “Look, these are the trails going up”.
The children revisited this collaborative artwork over several weeks and each time continued to add more detail and layers. Sometimes it is the same children that have been revisiting the art piece and continuing to work on areas they have already painted and/or adding to different areas too, and at other times, other children have been welcomed to include their contributions too. As the children have been working, they have been adding details e.g. dot patterns and filling in areas that have not yet been painted. The children have begun to realise and learn that once an area has been painted and dried, this can then be used as a background to add another layer to.
It has been exciting to watch the children painting their own symbols e.g. hearts and butterflies and also including those Aboriginal symbols they are already familiar with e.g. rainbow, girl, boy and rain.
Once completed, the painting was shown at morning meeting to the children. At this time, we all had the opportunity to look at and celebrate the artwork so far. We discussed and looked at the small details, such as some of the symbols the children painted.
This creative art piece is simply beautiful, and our hope is to make it a permanent piece of artwork displayed at Kornmehl for many years to come. We wanted to share this artwork with our Emanuel community. We hope you enjoy it too.
Jeans for Genes Day
We raised $88 on Friday last week for Jeans for Genes Day. Thank you to all our Kornmehl families for their generous contributions so support genetic research for young children.