Babushka Love Workshops

Turtle mosaic from last year’s class.

Year 2 science project is on the way. We are going to colour the flowers (and celery) to see how the water travels up the plants 🪴 .

Christmas angels from our last class of the term. Who doesn’t love the sparkle?

We have been making some decorations from clay.

These are our birthday party favours. If you’d like to know how to make them, watch the video I just posted with step by step instructions ♥️.

Happy Halloween everybody!
Is everyone ready for the bed-time sugar crash today?

Ezra brought home from school. I thought that was clever :)

The plan for the next half-term! It will mostly be Christmas themed, making beautiful things to decorate our spaces with in this frosty🎄season.
Busy hands - happy hearts ♥️

Art & craft classes in Stoke Newington for kids aged 5-7 & 8-10.

After-school club Mon Tue Wed Fri with pick up from Betty Layward and Grazebrook primary schools.

🖌 process art
🖌guided craft projects
🖌weekend workshops

Use this link to register your interest: shorturl.at/ilsCN or get in touch via WhatsApp.

Register your interest in Babushka Love classes.

Today will be my last class of the Autumn half-term. I couldn’t be more happy about how it went! Looking forward to seeing new faces after the half term holidays!
I will take the next week off to plan additional weekend workshops for the next half term, and maybe even for the weekend before halloween 🎃 . Watch this space!

For young children, I believe art should be very process oriented. It’s most important that we allow children to be creative and encourage creativity. That means everyone might use materials differently and every piece of art looks different. We also need to recognize that art is different things to different people. We understand that when we view art – we might appreciate the colors but not want to buy it or have it displayed in our home. It’s personal.

You will find a lot of information about the benefits of offering PROCESS ART to children (and adults). Hovewer I would lke to also illustrate the importance of CRAFT, because often it is portrait the opposite of Process art and also inferior I would disagree.

It’s not art or it’s not creative if the end result looks like “something”? Of course not. Adults create art that “looks like something” all the time. Kids like to create crafts and projects that look like an end result too. While they are creating, there is a process.

A lot of the time in my art classes there is a mixture of both. Last week we made our own paints using grass, glue, water, food colouring and shaving cream. That is process art. But then we used our paints to paint a seascape, following my directions. We also cut out boats from autumn leaves and glued it onto our water, all of this following my directions. Each child did theirs differently. Along with mixing, painting, there was the process of selecting additional materials, arranging and gluing.

We might create a product in the end, but the process is what’s important. Art is and should be a messy open-ended exploration of a variety of materials. Art isn’t just paint and paper. It can be yarn, string, beads, clay, paper, fabric, foam, wood, glue and whatever else you can think of.

Does that mean crafts are not creative or developmentally appropriate? No, there is no one statement fits all.

Ezra and I had 10 minutes to spare in between school and his yoga class and he decided to do an art project inspired by Andy Goldsworthy. He has learnt about him at school and was eager to show me what the artist did. We found this long leaf and picked up all sorts of bits and prices that we found within 1 meter around us. My partner who is a biologist would call it a quadrant, which is use to study ecology. But in our case it wasn’t a grassland that we were observing but a small natural play area next to a cafe. Hence we found both natural and man-made things. Ez added a knotted leave “to improve our composition” for the photo. All I wished is that we didn’t have to rush to our class! Although Raha’s yoga and mindfulness classes are unmissable, they are so good.
This leaf composition is Ana example of PROCESS ART which I will be discussing on this page soon.
Have a lovely week everybody!