When the budget needs to go to the bone… stick figures come into their own.
When my client mentioned a new job involving the supervision of schools, the budget was smaller than usual. So she came up with the novel idea of doing stick figures. Because she was laughing, I thought she was joking.
It worked quite well – even stick-people can convey a concept, emotions, and frustrating situations.
Some appear in the first three pics: the disruption of a schoolday by lots of cars full of officials arriving, with everyone rushing to ‘make nice’; the intrusion into school time with the teachers feeling they have to socialise with the officials while the children do no learning; the distraction during classes by the Visitors.
Other images show the various types of schools found there. Some are humbler than others. All can be well-run.
Since a calm child is much more teachable, Jeanne Welsh’s yoga cards make the learning experience more pleasant and beneficial for the teacher and the class.
Together with Nia Thorpe, Jeanne co-founded ‘Calm Classrooms’, an initiative to calm classrooms by means of yoga. The classroom materials consisted of 35 yoga cards showing various selected positions.
In their own words:
The pace of the world in which today’s children are growing up, is only getting faster. Our aim with the Calm Classrooms cards is to encourage children to slow down from the inside out and provide them with meaningful tools for life!
The 35 desk-based activities that make up the Calm Classrooms card deck can be used as a behavioural resource. The resource is easy to use, and helps to create a calm, learning-friendly environment. Its benefits go well beyond the classroom too! Absolutely anyone can use and benefit from our programme – teachers, children, parents and therapists.
The Calm Classrooms cards are based on experience and research, which has shown that calmer children will develop the capacity to gain greater attentiveness and mental focus as well as manage stress and anxiety levels.
In addition, the activities were specially chosen for their suitability for the typical classroom space, and busy schedules. The cards have been divided into five exciting and accessible topics, enabling the teacher easily to draw on memorable, imaginative, safe and achievable activities with little disruption. The five Calm Classrooms topics are: Move, Focus, Relax, Breathe and Connect.
The Calm Classrooms behavioural resource is a simple way to make children’s lives happier and healthier, increase their capacity to learn effectively, manage their emotions, self-regulate their behaviour, and achieve academic and personal success.
Jeanne Welsh now offers professional development workshops and trainings for educators, students, parents and therapists as well as in-house training and development programme for schools.
Apart from teaching yoga in Bali, Jeanne also offers courses online. See her website here.
Poetry illustration – when words and pictures dance the good dance
Finding the images to go with a poem can be a very fine line to dance along. Images that come up are personal to everyone who reads the poem. And yet many things about any poem are universal. They tug at common heart-strings; the language is designed to distil a lot of feeling and meaning into very few words. Illustrating poetry is up there as the champagne of illustration, for me at any rate. How can one not feel honoured when asked to embellish someone else’s work of art?
It’s intimidating, but – probably because I love poetry, that quells the fear. It can be very challenging to put into visual form what the poet has already put into a kind of word-image, so vividly are the images evoked, very often.
These are a few selected poems from a recent job for Shuter & Shooter, Pietermaritzburg.
Enjoy the poetry and you are most welcome to weigh in with your thoughts on any poem and/or image.
