As part of Talk About Art’s ongoing research into the impact of high-quality arts and cultural engagement in early years settings, we teamed up with the staff and children at Abbey Wood Nursery School.

 

Artist Aron Weber designed a series of workshops that would explore how the children develop early relationships with materials, shapes, movement and memory. In the first session, children were invited to draw what they were looking forward to in their school holidays on a long, collaborative roll of paper, that they would use throughout the project. The activity combined motor skills with memory and gesture, encouraging the children to treat the paper as a physical object rather than just a surface.

 

Further workshops focused on the children’s favourite moments from the school day with their roll of paper taken outdoors, lifted into the air, where drawings could be seen from both sides. The children were able to watch their drawings interact through the material, revealing overlaps and contrasts between past and future, memory and imagination.

 

Our final workshop saw the children fold their paper into new shapes. They drew again, this time responding to the surfaces created by the act of folding. Through this process, ideas of movement and spatial awareness were connected directly to the material. The paper became not just a support for drawing, but a form in space that could be reshaped, inhabited, and reinterpreted.

“While Aron’s workshops encouraged the children’s creative, cognitive and social development, they also helped to build the confidence of our staff and for them to embed creativity in their teaching.”

 

Gillian Crowley

Headteacher, Abbey Wood Nursery School