Fifth Period

Alternatively Titled: The Adventures of an American General Education Major, Fresh Out of College, Teaching Grade One Art in a Nepali Classroom

 

Me and the grade ones with our napkin flower collage projects.

I can’t remember if I have previously revealed that awhile ago my grade one co-teacher asked me not to teach English anymore. It’s not actually as bad as it sounds since grade one is supposedly English medium which means all subjects should be taught in English. Long story short, I now teach a subject where the government textbook is titled “My Social Studies and Creative Arts.”

 

In the past five or six weeks, we have completed the remaining chapters from the social studies section. So the rest of the book is for creative arts including topics like: collage, clay, and printmaking. In general, I find the idea of doing art with adorable children pretty appealing. We have already done some step-by-step drawings on the board and the kids are surprisingly attentive during this activity. But the more serious the crafts become the more materials and preparation are required.

 

I always try to be cognizant of the fact that my presence at Kitini is temporary. My goal is to use creative new teaching strategies that I think the teachers could use again without too much additional effort. If I bring in outside materials, I try to select items that can be found for little or no cost, or that I can purchase and leave behind. When I make games or flashcards, they are either durable enough to be reused or made out of scraps of blank paper I cut out of the margin of the notebook I use for planning. I want to give teachers as few reasons as possible to dismiss what I’m doing as something they could do, on their own, after I’m gone.

 

With this attitude in mind, I spent a pretty decent amount of time during the Dashain holiday pondering how to teach art with little to no conventional art materials. I already have several boxes of crayons that I use with the kids so simple drawing, coloring, and relief printing is easy. (For paper I usually just have the kids use their regular notebooks, but I’ll have to find a way to obtain something else when we start using wet materials like glue and paint.) For collage, there is always the option of using old newspapers. In brainstorming ways to get color I thought about having the kids use crayon on the newspaper before tearing it into pieces. Then I realized that yellow and pink napkins are also easy to find and cheap. Thus was born the napkin based flower collage activity which you will see below. I have one, half dried, black inkpad that we will probably use to do fingerprints or stamping at some point. And I have already made up some homemade play-dough with flour and water. I will need a larger batch to use it with a whole class, but I’m thinking about showing the teachers how to make it at a future workshop so letting them do the mixing will solve that problem. Mosaics can be made with practically anything; I even found a cute turtle craft using a paper plate and lentils. If anything, I KNOW that lentils are available here.

 

I did purchase some food coloring in the city, but that is beyond what I expect teachers to do. According to the internet there are also lots of ways to make your own natural paint dyes! I wish I was kidding. After reading up on flour based paints and vegetable colors, I concluded that taking a nature walk to gather plants and sticks/grass to use as brushes would be a super eco-friendly and fun activity. But there’s also a lot of ambitious things going on in my all-natural first grade art class imagination, so I decided that should wait until the end of the unit. I did find out that the grocery store sells old 6x6 egg crates for one rupee each so once we get to painting I have the perfect containers.

 

Fast forward to the end of Dashain and the start of school. I had planned a no-frills drawing activity for the grade ones with extra time to play “over-under” the exciting game of passing a ball around the circle alternating between giving it over your head or between your legs! Seriously though, it’s a huge hit. On special occasions I make up times and we race to do it even faster! Sometimes I worry that I get too much of a power trip by working with six year olds who will do practically anything.

 

Anyways, during said simple drawing activity I checked in with my co-teacher to make sure I wasn’t missing information about a magical supply closet somewhere full of art things.

 

Me: “Social studies siddhyo. Ahile art?” Social studies is finished. Now art?

Teacher: “Yes.”

Me: “Materials chha ki chaina?” Materials exist or no?

Teacher: blank stare

Me: “Paint chha ki chaina? Brushes? Glue?”

Teacher: “Paint no, small glue.”

Me: “No paints, no brushes, maybe a little bit of glue?”

Teacher: “Yes.”

 

This conversation confirmed my earlier suspicions that I shouldn’t count on having much to work with, and I gave myself an invisible gold star for accurately anticipating the situation.

 

 

 

* * *

 

The next day I came to class armed with colored napkins, some cheap glue bottles I found at the grocery store, and a sample flower collage. I displayed my sample to generate interest and then had the kids watch me make another one before sending them back to their seats and looking for the quietest students to get their materials first. 

As I am passing out napkins, my co-teacher scurries over to the always locked cabinet in the first grade classroom. I know she has the key and I have seen it opened before… it’s full of crumpled up old papers and some wooden boards made to stand up with paintings of different family members on them. No sign of crayons, markers, or other consumable items. A moment later she whips out a stack of vibrantly colored tissue paper! Where did that come from? I have yet to see tissue paper sold anywhere in this country so I certainly wasn’t expecting it to show up in my school.

 

So maybe there is more to that cabinet than I previously thought. While the kids are happily ripping their napkins and getting glue all over the tables I go over and ask if I may have the key to take a look for myself, just in case there are any other buried treasures. The teacher hands me the key and when I open the door and start rummaging underneath piles of trash she says, “Tell what you need and I get.” But I don’t even know what to ask for and I really just want to see for myself. So I ask her to give out more pink napkins and keep digging.

 

 

 IT’S ACTUALLY A SUPPLY CLOSET!

THERE ARE SUPPLIES IN IT!

 

I find all sorts of good stuff like full color printed, laminated, English flash cards! A class set of dice! Copies of old exams (which I have been asking to see for weeks now!) Blank chart paper in several colors! A pocket chart! An old clock – exactly what I’ve been wishing for in class two where we are learning to tell time and really struggling to understand that the hour hand doesn’t always exactly point to the number. Large print stories to go with each chapter for the social studies book provided by Rotary International! More wooden figures with people and animals!

 

PAINT!

 

I’m not even irritated that no one thought it would be a good idea to tell the volunteer English teacher, “hey so we have a whole cabinet full of laminated words, letters, and flashcards in English if you wanted to use them….”

 

Mostly I’m over the moon about the paint. (And let me tell you, this whole thing would have played out very differently if I had spent my Saturday boiling vegetables to make natural dyes and then come to class and watched my teacher pull paint out of the cabinet. My amusement would have been significantly less.)

 

My joy and delight led me to spend my lunch hour sorting and organizing the cabinet while I simply basked in the availability of so many things I had been pondering making myself. If there had been an earthquake, I would have died extraordinarily happy underneath that cabinet. 

 

 

Please note that the before picture was after I'd already been digging for 20 minutes :)