Evaluation Of The Crafts in the Classroom Project

Did students, teacher & artist enjoy the project? Yes  we all enjoyed it very much. But it certainly was not effortless.

Students: The boys enjoyed it very much and are proud of their collective achievements.
Teacher: Enjoyed the project but did not realised how much work was involved. She thought that we did a lot of cross curricular work which was very beneficial.
Artist: Very much so. It was a lot more work than I thought.

Would we do it again? Yes of course we would!!!
I personally think that art & crafts projects are a very pleasurable, efficient and  creative way to teach children about the interdependence of different school subjects. It also opens the possibility to learn in a child friendly way expressing the children’s own feelings and challenge their own abilities.

Did we achieve our aims?

Our aim for the whole project were

• Everyone is getting involved
• Everyone is learning new skills
• Widen our knowledge
• Create awareness
• Learn about ourselves
• Benefit  to be part of a collective project
• See ourselves as part of a bigger picture
• Explore>>>

Yes everyone got involved. Even so it was sometimes difficult to give everyone the same opportunity. But because there were so many elements to the whole project all got involved and everyone made a booklet, a clay bear and a little polar bear for themselves as well.

All learned hand sewing skills, emphasis on helping each other. Everyone had a go on the sewing machine. Writing & drawing skills, Skills in how to make a simple booklet. Boys loved the sewing especially the sewing machine!

• The boys got knowledge about fabric, stuffing material, about bears, about people & bears and the environment, knowledge about recycling.
• Knowledge about the different countries that bears are living in.
• Knowledge of filming a video.

We created awareness

• Of global warming
• Especially awareness about WWF and polar bears and endangered species
• Awareness that we as people, countries and worldwide nations have to do something about it.
• Power, opportunities  & influence of IT and our presents in setting up our own blog at http://saintpatricksschool.wordpress.com
• I think we learned a lot about ourselves and how we interact within a group. I thought the boys were very good in telling us if someone was upset or needed help and were also helping each other out all the time. They were all very excited about the project days.
• We have seen that we are part of a much larger, worldwide environment and have to connect with other nations to work on the same goals.

What would we change or approach in a different way next time?

Even so we worked on a collective project it was quite important to the boys to have something to take home themselves.
We did far too much a very short time. I would have put a few hours in afterwards in my own workshop and also worked on the documentation. It also created a lot of extra work for the teacher. Next time I would just work on a smaller scale.

Sometimes boys were waiting to do something when it was not there turn.
It would have been better to keep them busy all the time which means more communication between teacher and artist.
We had just one sewing machine working on the day. To give the boys a longer lesson on it we needed two.

There are many spin off opportunities like to learn the history about bears in Ireland, bears in the Irish language. Stories about bears.

Connection to schools in other countries like Alaska where people have to live together and respect bears in the wild. Bear sculptures of the North American Indian>>>

We just touched on filming small videos and one big downfall is that we not managed to add those to our blog yet.

We encountered a huge problem regarding our blog  at the beginning.

I already had set up a blog when we realized it was not accessible through the school. By the time I had set up a second blog we knew there was no way we were able to get into it because of the schools filtering system. This was quite a blow for me because I really wanted the boys to be in charge of the IT part of the project.

It also meant a lot of extra out of project hours work to put on the text the boys had written and the teacher had to encourage them to go online at home with their parents and add comments.

It was all worthwhile in the end. It was about crafts in the classroom an art project filed with creativity, fun and skillful work. Well done boys! You can be very proud of yourself.