Inflatable Christmas Tree Fun

I celebrated Christmas on wednesday, which was attually St Patric's day (the patron saint of Gunniess) For a over a year and a half I've been working with teenages that have been expelled from school. My job is to teach art, but the catch is I only have a box of broken crayons and half a rubber, and some poster paints, but no paint pallets and know folders to keep work safe so quite often the student put their work in the bin at the end of the lesson. I do occasionlly get other more intresting stuff but it gets used up really quick.

Last week was a good week though, and I finally won my campain for good art stuff, so for the first time ever we have really deccent acrilic paints and oil pastels and charcoal and canvases, which makes teaching art so much more fun. I wanted the student to take ownership over their new stuff and really look after it and value it. So I decided on having pretend christmas. This involed me cycling 8 miles through liverpool with and inflatable christmas tree on one handle bar, and tubes of acric paint wraped in wraping paper on the other (well technically is wasn't wraping paper it was free wall paper samples but whatever) I also had tinsel and a santa outfit in my bag.

So instead of my class walking into their normal class room they walked into a kind of low budget santa's grotto, but they loved it. They ripped open the presents in about 30 seconds, and I did acheive my aim of getting them to take ownership, but they took that a bit to far. After they'd opened the presents I said 'ok lets get the desks out and put all the art stuff in the middle' but things I tell them to do are not often top of their list of priorities. As far as they were concerened they had just been given a gift and they wern't ever going to give it back or share it. The tubes of paint were already in their bags. One girl had 20 pencils that she was going to keep all to herself, one girl had unwraped 2 canvases and wasn't prepaired to give away one of them. The only thing they were willing to share out were the document wallets, I guess you can't get a lot of weed in return for 20 document wallets.