“Teacher, Teacher, I’m finished that work,what will I do now?” How often do youhear that clarion call and how often do youanswer the enquiry with: “Get somethingto read from the library.” or: “Get a work-sheet from the spare pile.” or: “Do somepractice sums in your maths workbook.” Asteachers we rarely look to the subject areaof visual arts to provide additional work forearly finishers. I understand that it is diffi-cult in most classrooms to enable pupils tofinish work from an art portfolio that in-volves paint, clay or construction materialsbut continuing with a piece of fabric workis an ideal solution or, as I am suggesting inthis article, try look-ing to the strandof drawing for in-spiration.

The primaryschool visual artscurriculum statesthat the main over-arching objective fordrawing, at all classlevels, is that childrenshould be enabled touse a variety of drawingtools and surfaces tomake drawings basedon experimentation,experience, imagi-nation and ob-servation.The idea of

the drawing box is a simple way to use upthose periods of free time to engage indrawing tasks in all four areas. The box it-self can be of any size and nature andstands in a prominent position in the class-room, often on the teacher’s desk. Theteacher uses a variety of sources to fill thebox with suggested drawing topics (mostoften printed or copied onto pieces of lam-inated card) and the children are free topick topics from the box, normally withoutlooking. The teacher may use four different

colours of card to indicate the differentstimuli. In this way the teacher can add anew solution to the what now questionand say: “Take a drawing topic from thedrawing box to work on” or: “Work on/Fin-ish your drawing.” The following are somesuggestions for source material for each ofthe four types of stimulus/activity that Ifound particularly successful.

A simple activity to encourage drawingbased on experimentation requires theteacher to design and prepare a variety of

Cúrsaí Teagaisc

58 InTouch March 2015

Teaching Matters

InTouch March 2015 59

Experimentation in drawing with pastels

small cards for the box such as the follow-ing, using symbols or words. The drawingtask for the child is to choose a particularcard and to explore the elements and/ortools noted on that card to produce eithera non-representational or representationaldrawing.

To encourage children to create drawingsabout their own personal experience, aset of cards might be prepared for inclu-sion in the box that indicate happenings,situations or events that might have hap-pened in the child’s own life. Again thesecould use pictures, symbols or words.

I have always found that drama resourcebooks are an excellent source for drawingtopics that stimulate children’s imagina-tions. Other stimuli include good visualdescriptions taken from poetry and litera-ture. Examples of the latter might be thedescription of the dragon from The Hobbitby JRR Tolkien or The Traveller by Walter dela Mare – these copied, pasted and lami-nated on card. Any willing teacher can find

hundreds of such potential visual gemsthat will inspire!

One of the best drama texts for sourcematerial is The Drama Ideas Bank by MaryBrooks that contains such gems for draw-ing such as: ‘You find a snake in your lug-gage’, or ‘you bring your dog into a chinashop’, or ‘you have to put up your tent in ahowling gale’ – wonderful visual images towork with! It is an easy task for the teacherto adapt all the ideas for quick improvisa-tion, one word improvisation, pair improvi-sation, twists and turns, dialogues, first/lastlines, situations, charades and mime anduse these to create an exciting set of cardsfor the drawing box.

Look around your own classroom to find or-dinary, everyday visual stimuli on which tobase cards for the box and also begin tobuild up a collection of drawing objects thatthe children can observe closely and makedrawings about. Examples might include• Empty your pencil case on the table and

draw what you see.• Get the collection of beach pebbles,

arrange them and draw them.• Get a piece of patterned fabric and draw

what you see• Look at a seashell through a magnifying

glass and draw what you see.• Draw your own hand.• Draw a portrait of your teacher.

To focus on the work of cartoonists I oftenalso include in the drawing box singleframes or cells cut from comic books. Thetask for the child is to glue this to the cen-tre of a blank page and to continue thedrawing. It is of course very important thatyou as the teacher ensure that there is awide variety of drawing tools available forchildren to use in their work. Ensure thatthere is a variety of types/textures of paperand a range of age appropriate tools suchas drawing pencils, charcoal, graphite,chalk, markers, colouring pencils, crayons,chalk pastels, oil pastels, drawing pens anddrawing inks.

Try the same idea out for painting byselecting ideas and stimuli that par-ticularly lend themselves to the ex-ploration of colour. The work of au-thors who specialise in visialisationare particularly good for this

Michael O’Reilly hasworked for many years with theNCCA, the PCSP, theNCTE/Scoilnet and variousother organisations on the designand implementation of the artscurriculum. He has published

widely in the field of visual arts education andin the areas of intercultural education, specialeducation and literacy. Contact Michael atoremichael@gmail.com if you are interestedin having him visit your school in an advisoryor staff training capacity and check outwww.iamanartist.ie and www.scoilnet.ie foradditional visual arts ideas for your class.

5… children should beenabled to use a variety

of drawing toolsand surfaces to

make drawingsbased onexperimentation,experience,

imagination andobservation6

Michael O’Reilly suggests that teachers whobelieve in freedom of expression need to nurturethe young artists seated in our classrooms everyday and provide them with lots of opportunities tocreate all types of drawings.

Drawing about experiences– in my garden

I went for

a walk inthe

woods

with my

family

Cards to indicated happenings forexperimentation

Sample drawing box Drawing the imagination - dragons

Nits Are e Pits – from a poem by RogerMcGough

Beach stones – observational drawing