School Arts Week Workshops
Each year we help schools across the country celebrate the creative arts by supporting children to explore, engage and develop their own creativity through a wide range of participatory art workshops.
We believe that art is for everyone, that everyone should have the opportunity to participate in the creative arts – and that participating in the arts unlocks and develops whole sets of valuable, transferable skills.
Our Workshops
What makes our workshops so special is that each one is delivered by a professional artist, both specialised in their given artistic field and highly experienced in sharing their talent and experience with children and young people.
Whether it is a day exploring Shakespeare, a workshop that sees children produce their own clay head sculptures, or a session creating soundscape poetry, we have something that we promise will bring the arts alive in your school!
We’ve given some suggestions for Arts Week workshops below but are always happy to discuss tailoring any of our workshops to suit your schools topic or theme!
Shaking up Shakespeare
By the end of this experiential and fun-packed 2-hour session, students will know both the backstory and the principal characters of a play of your choice – and have a greater understanding of iambic pentameter!
Play in a Day
Our Play in a Day workshop (which can even be achieved in half a day!) allows your pupils to start from a completely blank canvas and create a meaningful, engaging and immersive dramatic narrative. They’ll choose the theme themselves – and the genre – and experience the action as the story unfolds
Finding Your Voice
Focusing on a theme chosen by you, students will work as a whole group to compose a melody and chorus – then in small groups to write the verses. The workshop will finish with a rendition of their completely original song!
Soundscape Poetry
After working both in small teams and as a whole group to create collectively written poems that make the familiar completely unfamiliar, students will transform their labours into word mosaics, creating some beautiful works of visual art.
Concrete Poetry
After participating in experiential activities designed to stimulate and harness ideas, pupils will be introduced to some mazing ways of creating rhyming or blank verse – in eluding SoundScape Poetry, Personification Poetry and Concrete Poetry!
Jigsaw Stories
How well do pupils know well-loved tales? Having pieced together the key moments of a given story in the correct order, small groups then dramatise scenes, culminating in a whole-class retelling of the tale.
Fiction Fusion
How does a cover make you want to open the book? Through exploring this question, children will create their own unique bookplates – each one representing a hybrid of two of their favourite works!
Visual Arts
Our visual arts workshops include:
Banner making: Having worked with the artist to come up with their own political manifesto children will make a colourful banner with various materials to reflect this. A wonderful way to promote pupil voice and an opportunity to raise aspirations too!
Large Scale Collaborative Drawing: Watch the magic unfold as large groups of children work together on one huge sheet of paper to create a striking work of art for your school. This can be based around a theme of your choice.
Clay Heads-on-Sticks: What do sculptors do to transform a misshapen lump of clay into an animated mask? This workshop leads children through a step-by-step process allowing them to design their own lifelike (if scaled down) clay heads – that can later be painted and taken home.
Textile Puppets: What strange creatures, unknown to science, come out in the school grounds at night? Your students will create these weird beasts from scrap textiles and found materials – before exploring their lives in the style of television nature documentaries. Watch out, David Attenborough!
Banners of Life: After working individually to create their own individualised fabric ‘tiles’, children will collaborate again to produce an overarching design for a rich and stimulating collective banner that can be displayed in the school.
School Testimonials
“The whole school has thoroughly enjoyed having you here today and it’s been great to hear all the pupils talking so animatedly about your workshops and the poems they created.”
“I just wanted to say a huge thank you to Jo for delivering such fantastic, fun and engaging Poetry sessions with our children. Jo, you have such a warm, positive manner with the children and they were all engaged and inspired! What a lovely way to end the term and this time learning remotely.”
“The students really loved Jo’s enthusiasm and passion for poetry and really enjoyed performing the poetry, which was something we wanted them to focus on during our Book Week. She was very funny and comedic with the children and all year groups engaged well with her approach. The staff were very complimentary about her skills and presence in the workshop and have asked for her to be booked again in the future. We can’t rate her highly enough!”
“I wanted to take a moment to express our gratitude for your incredible delivery of National Poetry Day workshops. Your passion for poetry was clear, and every single one of the teachers spoke highly of you and your sessions. Similarly, the children were buzzing with excitement- I have received messages from parents about pupils’ enjoyment as well. It was a great day, and I look forward to your next visit.”
“Chris was absolutely incredible – the students gained so much for the workshop; albeit in sessions as short as half-an-hour. Students walked away with greater confidence and Chris really helped to create such a supportive and welcoming environment for all.
It was an absolute pleasure to work with you both, and I will definitely be in touch next year!”
“The girls at Glendower LOVED the workshops! – they enjoyed the workshops immensely and thought the facilitator was fantastic! – they gained confidence around poetry, in addition to understanding the freedom attached to the concept of creating their own poem. We can’t wait to have you back!”
