Mediums : Respecting Children through inspiring materials. By Sarah Probie & Rachel Hughes

If we truly have an image of the child as researcher or as a philosopher as Leigh challenged us with at the last in-service, we need to re-address the tools with which we provide our children with to communicate with.  With much experimentation, some failures! and some beautiful revelations throughout the past year we decided to share a few of the mediums we use each day that inspire both us and the children. Watercolours and gorgeous brushes. “Painting is a wonderfully sensuous experience.  Plunging into colour with a brush, gliding, swooping, skimming along, changing paper into a playspace aglow with colour—these are joys that enthral painters”. (Rapunzel’s Supermarket— by Ursula Kolbe).  The children use watercolours daily in the Atelier.  We mix the concentrated paint from the tube with a little water   in small white ceramic dishes.  We purchased watercolour brushes that would transport the paint effectively on to the paper and then created beautiful fluid lines.  The children became transfixed with this new quality of line and depth and variety of colour when it was introduced and many now ask to paint as soon as they come in the door in the morning! Graphite Pencils and willow charcoal. “Of all the visual arts, drawing is the quickest and most direct way of making ideas visible.  It is an incredibly powerful tool—a language—that enables children to explain things to themselves and to others” (Rapunzel’s Supermarket by Ursula Kolbe 2001).

To provide children with only ‘made for children’ art materials we are limiting their means to communicate their ideas to what ‘the image of the child’ the company who produces these products holds of children.  But can the children that we work with every day really communicate all their complex, unique and valuable ideas using only bright primary acrylics, palette paints, crayons, felt tips and stiff unrelenting paint brushes?

A variety of drawing mediums are continuously on offer throughout the day. The children are inspired by the gorgeous quality of line willow charcoal gives them and are able to achieve incredibly detailed work with the graphite pencils. “At first very young children often paint just a patch of colour.  For beginners, learning how to get a brush out of the pot, onto paper— and not somewhere else—and back into the pot is challenge enough”—Ursula Kolbe. Over the past year the Herne bay team have had many discussions about which mediums we choose to make available to the children, the ways in which we present these mediums to the children and how both these factors can contribute to children’s sense of respect, as well as affecting the way they work, think and create artworks.  We agreed that the mediums we provide our children with send a clear message about how we view children – as researchers, as artists, as competent communicators of 100 languages and more.