Support for Teachers

Support for Teachers

The Arts Society Shrewsbury has funded half day workshops to help primary school teachers who are not Art specialists develop their understanding of how to teach art more effectively in the classroom.

For a number of years the Society has sponsored an art competition connected to Shrewsbury Bookfest Book Awards and teachers had asked for guidance in how best to inspire their pupils. A total of 21 teachers attended the initial 3 hour workshop which was led by Karen Howell, a former art and design teacher, and hosted at Shrewsbury Museum.

The interactive session led the teachers through a review of a variety of popular children’s illustrators with a discussion of key features of the different styles; through the process of creating a summary of the key characters from a story; and through the ways to use a simple storyboard to help children identify which scene from the book they would like to illustrate.

Teachers learned that it was important to remove the pressure from the children to feel that they have to create everything from scratch (tracing paper and photographs can be helpful) and the use of different media should be encouraged.

Jeremy Wallace, Young Arts Co-ordinator at The Arts Society Shrewsbury, said: “All the teachers that I spoke to felt that it was an extremely valuable exercise which will equip them to guide their pupils in artwork in general and Bookfest art competitions in particular!”

Jeremy and his team judged 450 entries, and The Arts Society Shrewsbury sponsored 92-piece art sets as prizes for all 31 schools that entered the competition.

Over recent years the judges had noticed a wide variation in artistic competence between the entries submitted by different schools. On investigation, it transpired that this variation had come about because some schools did not have any art-accredited staff, and it was to address this shortfall that the Society sponsored these practical workshops which teachers asked to be repeated at the next Bookfest.