At Oak Learners Before and After School Enrichment Program we explore a range of activities. We have Brain Training which is used to do homework and other brain building activities such as writing practice, reading, and spelling. Hands on activities for fun activities like building towers and creating patterns. Movement for motor skills exploration. Music class to introduce the kids to instruments, rhythms, and more. And my favourite, Art.
I absolutely love doing art with the kids! I get to teach them about new materials, how to use art materials properly to keep them working well for longer, and information about the projects and topics we are working on. I love the exploration, creativity, and learning opportunities that art provides.
As Oak Learners is also a day school we get to use the guidance of their planning to help us with our B.A.S.E projects. In October our day school kids learned about Indigenous ways of life 600 years ago. So, naturally, for B.A.S.E we enjoyed learning about the same topic. We started with planning out our villages which made for fantastic discussions on why Indigenous people lived the way they did, what made sense, what was practical and what was available to them.
Our older groups of kids (Saplings and Rangers) asked a lot of questions about resources such as food and water and why they used the materials they did. Once we had created a plan on paper for what we thought we wanted to bring to life in a miniature village we moved on to brainstorming the types of materials we could use.
Once we had a plan we started by bringing our plans onto pieces of cardboard, first by sketching areas and then by painting a base layer of green and blue. Then we had to interpret the paper plans to the larger base and decide on where we would place trees, teepees, the central fire pit, crops, and more.
For the rocks we used clay, the sitting logs we used sticks. A fun project was an experiment in using real dirt from outside for the base of the firepit area. We found that we couldn’t use hot glue because it clumped and was hard to spread out onto the entire area we needed to cover. So we used regular school glue, covered the area using the surrounding clay stones as a barrier and then piled on dirt to cover the glue. There were some problems. The glue leaked out of the area so I had to keep cleaning that up and we ended up repainting the area later on. The dirt-glue area also took a few days to dry. In the end it looked great though.
For trees we hot glued on fir branches cut down to size and used skewers (and a YouTube video) to create teepees. The kids then painted them with simple, colourful designs. Once the teepees were ready we also glued them to the base. The rocks, water area, and grass areas received more fresh paint and then we added some weeds for crops.
While we didn’t get to finish everything we had wanted to, we had a lot of fun creating our mini villages and learned a lot of interesting facts. The kids learned about wet areas for crop maintenance, communal living, available materials, and the Indigenous use of resources. Of course they also got to see art materials in a different way and I hope that from now on they will have a wider range of art materials in mind for future projects.
I’m already looking forward to the next projects and can’t wait to share them in the next Oak Learners unit showcase in a few weeks.
Rowyn is passionate about Art and design. She has been working with Oak Learners since 2015, behind the scenes as a website designer, office administrator and IT Support. In 2022, Rowyn joined the BASE Camp team to share her love of Art and Nature with our students. In her spare time, Rowyn can be found walking by the lake, photographing nature and writing poetry.
