Hope this works out all right!

This week has gone very well work wise as I finished in one school then was asked to work in a special school doing 2and a half days a week till Christmas.The level which the children are at is not defined as being within mainstream levels and so I have to go and research this area.

Having worked at this school before - I know how to plan lessons and follow routines.  However in light of my focus on the importance of Art in the Curriculum my mind is more open to the possibilities for creating art here. The school were also given the Black Box which means that the school will be having an Inspection in a couple of weeks.
At a special school where children are profoundly disabled the programmes are very sensory based. For example - A story would be told using a large picture book with appropriate props and puppets to enable the children who maybe visually or hearing impaired to understand the context better. Points of reference or pictures of activities are used to help the children understand where they are going to e.g. soft play or lunch.

At the moment I feel daunted by the prospect of the next few weeks and will have to look up LTS website for ideas.
Meanwhile my continuing art project is well under way. On a Saturday while walking the dogs I am looking for inpspiring things to put in my gathering bag - in my environment are many things and I am concentrating on litter just now.
After seeing the Street Art Seminar my mind has really opened up to the possibilities which occur around us by chance. Art is in the eye of the beholder.My collection of litter began with a marshmallow bag and moved into any bright wrapping I could find!
Today there was a lot of oranges yellows and browns funnily enough which I gathered along with a huge oak leaf. I think I will try these items together and hope you can see that permutation in  my photos from today. My interest in line has increased and I saw wiggly lines on sweet wrappers and elegant lines on chocolate bar wrappers along with some jagged lines in contrast.
Graphic designers need to know about the basic colour wheel before creating their work. I could see this know how in many of the wrappers found all had good colour contrasts in them.

The different lettering and how it is made to look appealing reminded me of Street Art. I think that a good collection of sweet wrappers etc would be a good starting point for a class to see examples of  different graphics which could lead to pupils creating their own writing which could in turn become a Street Art activity.Pupils could invent their own graffiti name etc..

Well now I shall download my recent photos of the above project and so please comment if you wish..
The first photo is inspired by the warm feelings one has when indoors on a cold night drinking hot chocolate. It reminds me of my family cafe and how as a teenager we were given all the cakes at the end of the day to take home and so fancy food was something which always tempted me. How much better off I am to just look at a picture of a cake than eat a real cake.
The colours of the marshmallows and cream on the hot chocolate are colours which I really like and so the idea progressed into the purple cup of chocolate - I used metallic acrylic and glass paint to experiment with colour and texture.

 The next two are the collections of litter from the last two Saturdays.I especially like todays see below as there are great colours there and I really liked the contrast of the curved lines of the natural oak leaf and the straight lines of the manufactured wrappers. I will develop this as a line and colour study.

This was my original pile of litter . The bright colours and interesting writing appealed to me. I picked out the marshmallows and chocolate bar to copy because I liked the elegant and jaggy lines in the bar wrapper and the shades of pink and yellow in the mallow wrapper.

This was an experiment and interst in both line and colour. The choc bar had a rawness of colour which contrasted with the soft pastel pinks of the mallows. The wavy lines were part of the decoration on a clear sweet wrapper.I used acrylic paint for the mallow and acrylic ink for the choc bar and glass paint for the wavy lines.