Introduce children to the idea that artists are often collectors and explorers. 

Visit the “Talking Points: Artists As Collectors & Explorers” resource and choose from one or more artists. Enable children to understand that by exploring our environments with “fresh eyes” and curiosity we can find inspiration for our artwork. 

Use sketchbooks to make visual lists of places and things you could explore and collect in your school, home and area. 

Get active and invite children to go outside into the playground or school area to collect and create “Patterns With Nature”.

Play with the objects to create new shapes and patterns on the ground, around branches, and on logs. Be curious. Think about how even ordinary things like twigs and pebbles might be interesting when you really look at them.

Gather the objects back to the classroom and explore composition and arrangements on paper and table tops. Don’t fasten anything down. Just play with the compositions you can make. Can you sort by colour, size, material, type?

Take photographs of the compositions. Ask the children to adapt and change how the objects are arranged or to photograph them from different angles or orientations.

Remember to reflect on the different elements of the session: active gathering and careful documentation. Discuss how the children found these approaches.

Create “Digital Collages” using this resource.

Print out the photographs and save them. They can be used later in the project.

Working in a sketchbook and using a variety of media (handwriting pen, pencil), try the exercises below, drawing the things you collected the week before as individual items (i.e. not part of a bigger composition). 

Continuous Line Drawings are a great way to get participants to loosen up, get them to look closely, and make new and interesting marks on the paper. With younger children (6 to 10) we sometimes call them “squiggle drawings”.

For full instructions visit the “Continuous Line Drawing” resource. 

Make drawings inspired by sense of touch. This is a fun way to encourage children to be really curious about what they are drawing. How do they use the sense of touch to find the  information they need to make a drawing? Can you forget what you know by sight? And how does this make your drawings look?

For full instructions visit the “Feely Drawings” resource. 

Choose one of the two projects below to explore how pupils can bring all their skills together into a finished drawing. 

In the “Wax Resist Autumn Leaves” resource, children are introduced to wax resist techniques, inspired by the rich colours and shapes of autumn leaves.

Begin with observational drawing techniques, using the objects you collected from your environment as subject matter, followed by an immersive exploration of colour and scale using wax crayons and Brusho Crystal Colours. If your pupils collected other objects rather than leaves, simply adapt the resource to suit. 

You might also like to visit the “What is Composition?” resource to help pupils think about how they might build an awareness of composition in their artwork. 

Use the “Autumn Floor Drawing” resource which you can find as the second part of the resource. to give pupils the opportunity to continue practicing their observation and mark-making skills, this time bringing in two added elements:

1) Thinking about composition. These drawings have no top or bottom as they are inspired by the fallen leaves and twigs on the ground. You might like to talk to pupils about composition using the “What is Composition?” resource. 

2) Great experimentation with different media. Explore graphite, water soluble graphite, wax resist and watercolour or ink, or a combination of all those media. 

Time to see the work which has been made, talk about intention and outcome.

Give the work the respect it deserves and clear a space to see all the work made, including the sketchbook work made earlier. Remind the children of their hard work and enable them to connect all the elements of their learning. 

If you have class cameras or tablets, invite the children to document their work, working in pairs or teams. 

You might like to assemble the drawings made in Week 2 and 3 into a “class” Backwards Sketchbook. 

Use the resource here to help you run a class “crit” to finish the project.