Higher Futures 4 You [workshop]

In June, I teamed up with a friend on the MMU Embroidery degree course to design and run a session in collaboration with AimHigher. The event was a ‘Higher Futures 4 U’ day and the brief was to design a fun and educational workshop for primary school children. The workshop had to promote higher education and it was desiable for the topics covered to connect to the degrees we study.

The session we designed asked the children to design a character and think about their career, hobbies and personalities. A career that would come from Illustration could be character design for games and animated films whilst the actual making of the character using materials and coloured pens involved skills both myself and Aramenta use on our courses. Kaye Tew, the organiser of the workshop days who also designs creative writing workshops advised us to try to involve as many senses as we could in the workshop as this would cause a better response from the children who are very responsive to different stimuli. The idea of using materials rather than coloured paper or just pens came from this advice as it envolves touch as well as sight.

The session took a lot of preparing as we had to create templates for the pupils and we cutout shapes and templates for clothes and objects for the childrens characters. In hind sight, simply providing scraps of materials would have been sufficient. The children wanted to cut out their own shapes on the day and they were so imaginative, they were cutting out tights and socks and all kinds of items that we hadn’t created templates for.

We predicted that the children would think up characters that were footballers and popstars. We were pleasantly surprised when the girls began describing characters that were archiologists and pharmasists while many of the boys wanted their characters to be doctors and lawyers. The session was definately a success. Even the children who created characters that had unrealistic jobs did so in an amusing and creative way. All of the children finished their characters and even the written description of their characters which was really impressive.

The session was so rewarding because the children and teachers all enjoyed the sessions and participated in the activity. Having supported people coordinating other workshops this is a very difficult result to acheive so we were really happy with ourselves for not only thinking up the idea but implementing it in a way that everybody participated. I would definitly run a similar session again and enjoyed the experience of running a session with children. My backup career plan is to be a teacher and this event showed me that I can successfully plan and run a lesson for childern of this age. The experience of having successfully run an activity for children reflects on my ability to motivate people.

Apologies for not showing the pupils smiles in the pictures, this is due to child protection laws.