Costumes into the Auckland Trash to Fashion Finals

Congratualtions to the students who had 4 costumes selected for the Auckland Trash to Fashion finals. The finals are a full dramatic production held at the Corban's Estate Art Centre in Henderson in September. This has been a great achievement and everyone at Summerland are proud of them.

An alien mother giving birth to a baby

The Mad Hatters tea party, the table setting

The gnome at the bottom of your garden

The happy fish

Finished Costumes

Yes, the costumes are finally finished in time to enter the Auckland Trash to Fashion competition.
Most of these costumes took 70 hours or more to make. The skills these students have learned are wide and varied: thinking, design, problem solving, decision making, perseverance, communication, team work, sewing by hand and with machine, weaving, and construction to name the obvious skills.

Making costumes continues

The students are well into making their costumes. It is very important to sit down and reassess the progress made at the beginning of each session. This helps focus the students and they are able to set plans and goals for work to achieve in the session. This part of the day has focused the students and reduced them jumping from one thing to another and/or not completing parts of the costume. Likewise at the end of the day they write a reflection on their performance (did they achieve their goals), the problems they en-counted and how they solved them.

Confidence is growing when using the sewing machine, hand sewing and gluing. The students are now helping each other with advice on how to do things, reinforcing boxes, sewing flowers, weaving and doing paper mache.

The work goes on...

Session 3 Trash to Fashion

The children have had a number of sessions using a range of materials to make impromptu costumes; always with great laughter and team work.

We had a session on how to draw a person using the formula of 7 parts. This was in preparation for doing concept drawings, drawing the costume on a model.
My reasoning is that if they know the dimensions of the body and draw their model to the correct size (near enough anyway), the costume design will be more in proposition.

At the beginning of the next session it came to light that several of the children were feeling unsure and thinking the whole process was too hard. We talked about how when new learning is taking place it is very hard and often you want to give up because it is very uncomfortable. Just by reassuring the children that this feeling was normal and they needed to work through gave them courage and all stayed on task right through the day.

The next step was to brainstorm the things one would find in the environment of the themes (space, Wonderland or the garden). After recording a good list of things and creatures, the children chose two creatures and did a quick sketch of how they envisaged the creatures looked. After this a choice of creature had to be made to develop more extensively.

Concept drawing were started. It was amazing the problem solving and thinking that flowed. The children, for the first time really started considering the materials they needed and how those materials would look on the costume.

Many children found it very helpful to work through this process. They had all preconceived ideas of their costume and suddenly the ideas changed and really creative ideas began to develop. In several personal reflects at the end of the day children stated they learned that it is okay to change your mind.

Trash to Fashion - Initial lesson

We gained an understanding of what Trash to Fashion involves: the rules, expectations, time frames, and the themes to choose from.

All day the children have been working in small groups that constantly changed with each activity. This was done so everyone gets to know each other and for the chance to work with people outside their circle of friends. Next week the children will have to choose groups to work in, to design and create their costume. By working with many children in the class they may have found a like minded person never before considered for their group.

We discussed trash and recycling and looked at past Trash to Fashion winning costumes.

To get they creative juices flowing I included two fun activities. The first was an old favourite: draw a head, fold paper to hide it, pass to next person who draws shoulders to middle body, cover, pass on, next person draws mid body to thigh, cover, pass to last person who draws to the feet. The theme was: looking through a telescope into outer space a creature is looking back at you. What does it look like?

This got many of the children thinking outside the square in a low risk environment.

The second activity was to dress a model in some materials I found in a cupboard at school. The theme: The kings party. They were given 10 minutes to dress the model, working in groups of three. It was amazing to see how they solved the problem of attaching the materials. (no glue, tape, pins, staples were allowed).

The discussion with the children after showed that they had considered the use of colour in the decision making. This was interesting because we had not discussed colour at all.