stencil faces

Today we've been designing faces using stencils.

1. Gather together your materials: stencils of various sizes, paper and pens
2. Design a face using stencil letters to make the shapes of eyes, ears, nose, hair, mouth, freckles, spots, glasses... whatever you want on your picture

Joe's Vampire face

Ideas
1. You could try just using the letters in your own name, to make a self portrait
2. Try something grisly, a scary vampire face or a skeleton for Halloween...
3. Try making an animal face
4. Experiment with different colours of paper, or pens.

There are lots more examples of stencil faces at our flickr portfolio site 

Lois's stencil face

grisly plaster writing

Many boys relish showing of their scars, cuts and bruises, so why not take advantage of their grim nature and encourage them to write about it...

trapped under door
bleed a lot in bath
went black and fell off

1. Picture a time you hurt yourself, fell over, tripped over your shoe laces, banged your toe, fell out of a tree, off a skyscraper... how did you feel? What did your skin look like? What did it look like a week later? Talk through your ideas with a grown up, and then...
2.  If there are any spellings that you are unsure about, practice them on a separate piece of paper
3.  Write down a few words or lines on a fabric plaster
4.  Attach your plaster to the area of your body that was hurt
5.  Wear with pride.

Journals

With all the homework and day-to-day distractions during term time, it's hard to find time for Joe to write his journal. We now aim for at least once at the weekend, and with holiday coming up, I hope to encourage a daily journal entry.

The secret seems to be to keep things as fun as possible, and trying things that there wouldn't be time for in school. The example below, is a type of concrete poem. After a walk, he drew and wrote down some of his experiences.

Joe's journal page

This idea could be taken further by:

1. Go for a walk in a local park, into the country, a garden, or anywhere affected by the seasons.
2. Close your eyes and listen hard to the sounds around you, try and remember them, or write them down.
3. Collect leaves, sticks, pebbles.
4. Bring them home to draw or for collage material, these can be stuck down, written on, crushed, drawn around.
5. Write a list of the things that you saw, smelt, or heard, following the shape of the picture. Or perhaps the words could follow the shape of your walk?
5. PS. Experiment with colours too, using the colours of the season.