Adopt an Artist becomes Running with Scissors

The project got under way with a couple of days of presentations in which the three subjects on offer, maths, language and art were covered by the student teachers and the ECA students proffered snapshots of their work, partnerships were formed. As I had in my course of being a primary teacher used art frequently in a cross-curricual capacity and had especially enjoyed using it in creative writing I decided to embrace the challenge of integrating art in maths. So I teamed up with Callum Arthur who had given a fantastically energetic and motivating talk. Based in North Berwick High it also lent itself to an East Lothian bias.

Workshop sessions were provided at Moray House on all three subjects so I played maths games, made artist books and wrote a poem based on a painting. Additionally we all assembled at the National Gallery on the Mound where under the guidance of Jo Mawdesley we got into our school groups and tackled a painting under the pretext of using it to teach the three core subjects.  This was quite enlightening. The PGDE students all appear to be confident and outgoing. They bandied about Curriculum for Excellence parlance and I realised how rusty I had become.

Callum was not at that event. I caught up with him one week into his placement in North Berwick. He had a specific small group in mind. The subject areas to be tackled covered pattern and nets of 3 dimensional shapes. I had researched the collection for the National Galleries of Scotland so came furnished with images of paintings and sculptures I felt might lend themselves to the project. These comprised the following works:

It was my idea that one of these objects could be chosen as a basis for constructing a 3 dimensional display from the nets of shapes such as cuboids. This could be quite simple and easily achieved over a series of lessons. Material wise, good coloured card would be easy to obtain.