Year 8 students from St John’s School, many of whom live in Newton Aycliffe are enjoying a major creative arts’ activity, in the form of a literacy project, Roots in Our Community.
The Ernest Cook Trust awarded the school some funding towards a project linking literacy with environmental awareness and rural crafts. All classes are having lively sessions with performance poets Jeff Price and Ruth Dixon, creating haikus for burial in a poetry capsule, for display, and for distribution as illustrated postcards. Forty students have enjoyed workshops with artist Serena Hodgson constructing butterflies, dragonflies, spiders and bees in willow.
With artist Susan Warlock another forty students have demonstrated their creativity recycling old books, producing not only art works in their own right but stimuli for storytelling. Twenty students are learning the art of felt-making with artist Jackie Stonehouse and next term two other groups will have the opportunity to try their hand at dry stone-walling with craftsman Steven Bainbridge. In April there will be a series of falconry presentations and displays at school. At a later date outings are planned to places of environmental interest locally and further afield.
Students have been fully focused on the activities offered, have appreciated the opportunity to learn new, unusual skills and expressed great pride in what they have created. Now serious thought needs to be given to how and where to display their wonderful work!
