Batik

[Lia Winfieldale]

For International Week this year the school has decided to have the class teachers and students decorate their own rooms and do activities of their chosen countries. Previously, the parents would come into school during the weekend and decorate a room of their country and they do activities with the kids for a week. The children decided to do Indonesia, the country I was born.

We had to think of activities to do both for the younger and older kids. We decided to do a puppet show and a batik workshop. Since the kids will be responsible for doing the activities, they will need to know how to do the activities.

Yesterday we did our Batik worshop which took 2 sessions. The first session was talking about Batik, what it is and showing examples of both traditional and modern batiks. I did a quick demonstration from the planning stage and putting wax on the fabric. Then the children began designing their own. They had a lot of difficulties with keeping their ideas big and simple, so I had to oversea a lot of their designs before they moved on to the next steps.

The next session the children put hot wax on the fabric and painting their fabrics. I organised the hot wax pots on one table and the dyes, in small plastic cups, on a seperate table. The children were painting the dyes on for more control rather than dipping their fabric in dyes in the traditional method.

They throughly

enjoyed the workshop! They were exicted to begin with when I was collecting and setting up the resources in the classroom. The problem now is how to cater this workshop to visiting classes within a 45 minutes timeframe.

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