End of term

So, the school term is almost over! No more crazy children being cheeky and hilarious, frustrating, infuriating and generally just pretty amazing. No more huge smiles, love notes, hugs from tiny children, over dramatic screaming matches, fights over sharpeners, singing, laughing, chasing and playing. I'm going to miss teaching a lot.

Teaching art has been amazing. I love seeing the kids learn new things, work out problems, and just letting them having a space and opportunity to have some practical fun in a system which otherwise does not really encourage creativeness.

After a few failed lessons of portraiture and still life I quickly realised that doing more 'academic' art wasn't going to stick with these kids. They don't have the patience or attention spans to listen to me explain how to draw a grid for portraiture let alone do it. They are however extremely practical. These children have lived their lives fixing things, working and playing outside all the time, making toys, fixing pushbikes and motorbikes, cooking and cleaning. So while they may not be able to sit in a classroom and listen quietly for an hour they are quite able to fix a punctured tyre on a motorbike, replace a spark plug, cook a meal for their family or help their Dad bring in the plantain harvest. So, after realising this I started to steer my lessons towards more practical making things.

The best example of this was 7th and 8th grades final projects which were paper maché carnival-inspired masks.

The idea came about because I was trying to devise a way of me using up the mound of scrap paper that was steadily gaining mass as the weeks went on. After months of kids coming in and asking to draw something with such desperation you'd think someone was holding a machete to their back then after five minutes of concentration they loose interest and wander out leaving me with a half drawn flower or action hero, I had accumulated a very large stack of scrap paper.

To begin with I got them to work in pairs to cover a balloon with layers of paper using PVA. It worked fairly well and after at least three gallons of glue, a few hundred sheets of paper, and after a lot of breaking up of (mostly) good humoured glue fights I had a few dozen large, dripping white balloon eggs hanging from the drying line. The next challenge was to steer other classes (especially the dreaded fourth grade) away from using the half dry, gluey balloons as punching bags or volleyballs.

Once they were dry we cut each one in half so each person got half a shell. After cutting out the eyes and mouths we then moved onto the more challenging and exiting construction of horns and noses. To make the horns and noses I taught them how to roll up a sheet of paper into a point and use strips of paper to stick it onto the main body of the mask.

Tissue paper was next. By this point in the process thirty percent of the kids had lost interest and either given up on their masks or resorted to chucking what ever colour of tissue paper happened to be within grabbing distance at their constructions and each other. However having the odd non-tryer makes the more successful ones even better and I am now left with lots of beautiful, neat, well thought out and inventive masks staring down at me from the walls.

I love it when children come in out of school specifically to finish a part of their work or to ask for help, and during this topic my classroom was busy every afternoon with morning kids coming in to work on their masks. Now that they are all finished there is a steady stream of kids coming in to ask when they can take them home.

I still can't believe that we have almost finished teaching. I will miss the daily morning unenthusiastic mumbling of the national anthem, I’ll miss walking through kinder and having about ten tiny children suddenly stuck to my lower leg. I'll miss trying work out how everyone is related and watching how they interact together like a big family. I will miss being part of that family. I'll miss not having personal space and getting random hugs, danced with or picked up half way through lessons. I'll miss the strange half English half Spanish declarations of love from the older boys and the cute drawings from the little ones. Most of all I think I will just miss the banter, the sassy girls, cheeky boys and the creativeness of them all. In short I am just really going to miss being teeeaaacchhherrr.

Morning kids back in the afternoon - not in uniform