Forbury School
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When I first came to Forbury there was great difficulty displaying anything in school, particularly children's visual artworks or any photographic representations of what children may have been doing in the classroom.
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Because our children's self esteem and confidence were extremely low, they didn't like to see anything that they had done displayed anywhere. There was a lot of destruction in the corridors, and so I had to work out a way of how we could actually overcome this. We had to work at improving the self-esteem of the children. That was done by everybody taking every micro-opportunity to feed children positive messages, and to have corridor displays that contained those positive messages, and to celebrate anything that the children did at school.
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The children now respect the work that is in the corridor, they are proud of their own work that is done, and the children's artwork is regularly displayed about the school.
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Teachers have engaged children with David Hockney's portraits, and they have loved using photography to create their own self-portrait.
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We have taken as many opportunities as we can to include people from the community who can help us implement the arts curriculum. One of our parents, who is an art student, worked with classes doing portraits. The outcomes for the children were quite amazing. They had seen the artist at work; they had talked their way through the process, then the quality of their work improved considerably.
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We celebrate the children's art in as many was as possible, not only do we display in the classrooms and about the school, but we take the opportunity to have their artworks included in other publications, such as the Mainfreight Calendar. This calendar comes through the Duffy Books in Homes programme that is available to decile 1 to 3 schools.
