Little Josh included the ingredients for Rainbows. The sun, clouds and raindrops. His family are under his rainbow smiling together.It gave me great pleasure to be part of Cruinniu na nOg for the third time. The unique circumstances of 2020 allowed me to produce a piece of work that exists online for all to use. My Rainbow Challenge video was intended to build on the abundance of rainbows drawn by children during the pandemic. The intention was to hopefully be sent rainbow challenge drawings that reflected learning.
Making the video was a challenge in itself because I wanted it to engage people and be useful. Creating the content was not as easy as I thought it would be, However, I slowly got a little more familiar with the software and the problems it threw at me. It is taking time to get used to what the various tools do and even how to access them. It will take a good while yet for all of it to become easy. Issues like, do I record voice and draw at the same time or do I draw and do a voice-over later. One is more authentic in real-time but the other allows for finer edits. The experience is a learning curve.
I wanted to offer a little knowledge about how rainbows form to inspire children to learn through visual creativity. The video had over 300 views on YouTube in a short time. It resulted in drawings sent in from children in Mayo, Dublin, Carlow, and Waterford. It also had many positive reactions on social media.
Teacher Zoom
One person (a teacher) even shared the video via Zoom with her class and got 16 drawings in return. This was something I overlooked as all the children in the country are still in lockdown and at home. Had I been more in tune with this I could have cast my net wider to engage similar proactive teachers. A lesson learnt for future efforts.
Many children placed their homes under the rainbow as the “something” they cared about most. Children’s families were included in many drawings. A very young child ( age 6) included herself washing her hands as a way of caring for others.
Another poignant drawing came from a young child. It had her rainbow over a heart-shaped Earth surrounded by children of all colours holding hands. The background being clouds, the source of raindrops that produce rainbows with our sun. Several drawings included raindrops, clouds and the sun.
So lots of children created drawings that they had thought about and they produced evidence of learning via drawing. Am very pleased with the results so far and in the whole adventure, I learnt a lot myself.
