There comes a time in your life - when ... you could drop the ball and go back to being boring again. When you find something you love doing stick with it. Never mind what you perceive others think of you - if you are happy doing ART then keep doing it. My dilemma was - there is so much art around and how could I make a difference. So I threw away my hopes and dreams and got on with life, however without hopes and dreams and inspiration - life is boring.
Art helps me to see the beauty in every day life and gives me the need to keep on creating. In creating and looking for good images I lose my woes and am transported to another world full of snowdrops and sunsets.
When I focus on the good things in life more seem to appear - the opposite is also true.

 On you tube is a video about selective attention. Its about a gorilla and some people playing baseball - its an example of how we can focus so much on one thing we cannot see anything else.
A few weeks ago I attended a teacher's inservice at a secondary Art department. The group of Primary teachers were asked to bring along some good examples of - good practice to share with the secondary teachers who seem to wonder how primary teachers manage to produce such well educated pupils...
So I took along a castle P1 had made from junk covered in printed paper to look like walls.

The just of the meeting became a forum  which was used to say that the primary pupils would benefit from a six week lesson on tone and 3 D shape drawing which would save the secondary teachers six weeks of teaching in first year. It would also be beneficial if art records were created to identify what the pupils could do artistically at the end of primary school.

Maths, Language and other subjects are well planned and co -ordinated but it seemed that there are no programmes for art in place to follow and a lack of record keeping for artistic development..

With Curriculum for excellence a teacher can adapt and build lessons. It seems to me there are so many grey areas left that some teachers are overwhelmed. I actually felt angry that art seemed to take second place to other subjects, I also thought many of the secondary lesson could be taught to the primary pupils at an earlier stage.

My conclusion was I will teach the Primary ones about 3D shape which we do through junk building and construction and we will draw spheres and cubes and cuboids and put in some light and tone. We will use our knowledge of 3D shape to understand how to draw robots people and animals. Start this in primary one and the pupils will have a language of art which will increase their confidence.

My moan is that this information should be passed round they do so easily with other subjects. We could then have a universal - art based skills being taught throughout the primary schools which then dovetails into the secondary programme and is approved by secondary art teachers...