Eighth Week - Bunting 4.3.14

Welcome!

A quick post for you this week as the whole of the morning session of week 8 was spent doing lots of lovely chubbly assessment stuff!

Folders at the ready!

As I mentioned in the last post, the assessors were in this week to look at the candidate's portfolios. This meant that we spent the better part of the morning making sure everything was ship-shape and ready to go, which, exciting as it was, doesn't make for very good photographs! So instead I'll skip straight to the afternoon, where we started work on something a bit more interesting ;)

Most of our readers will know how we here at Cultivate like to try and keep things creative. With that in mind, we challenged the team to sew us up some bunting which we could display at the final volunteer event - the outside kiln firing with Kevin for the Creative Communities programme. But, of course, this was no ordinary bunting, as in true Cultivate style the words and images on the bunting had to represent the volunteers' experience so far -their tasks, their level of participation, and the impact they felt they had made.

As usual, all the work done was first class. It's not quite all finished yet but here's some photos to help you get an idea.
 

Nicole's Positive Message

Almas's starts to take shape

Almas is nearly finished!

Nicole's also making good progress!

Sarah's getting to the heart of the task!

Pretty flower, just for fun!

Watch out for next week's post, where we'll be investigating how each of our team answered and how they chose to sum up their volunteer experience. What will they have taken from the course? What has meant the most to them? Maybe one or two of them will comment below to tell us and in doing so contribute to one of the outcomes on the course? [hint hint!!]

Let's hope so. I leave you with this rather wonderful picture of all the week 8 participants. What a photogenic bunch!

This was honestly the closest I could get to "everybody smile!"

Seventh Week - Making Week 25.2.14

Hello again!

This week the volunteers got some experience of volunteering behind the scenes of one of our Creative Communities events. Lead by Sarah, Almas and Alice, all of whom were at the last Woodside event, the team designed and prepared activities to run alongside tile making at the family event.

Sarah sorts through materials

Anne helps

And Almas too!

Some of us prefer to play with giant pencils ;)

Kierah makes sure all the stamps are working. A hard job!

Ashleigh is Square Cutting Queen!

Yep, that's right. STILL stamping!

We're not messy...

In the end the volunteers decided to use all that stamping to good effect by making a prompt to hang on the wall at the event.

Vicky and Nicole cut out lots of foam shapes for printing

Ashleigh and Linsay designed this box which is for storing tiles, since at the last event they realised there was no room and no place to keep the wet clay tiles safe.

Sarah also cut foam shapes

Sarah and Almas used their checklist to make sure we had all the equipment and materials we might need

Everyone's working hard!

Some foam shapes

Some of the volunteers who were at the first Woodside event got the chance to work on their leadership skills, by demonstrating for the rest of the group how to do each activity and then leading them through it.

Sarah explains to the rest of the group how to do the collages with families, since she's an expert after the pop up event!

The team make collages of their own

Here are some of the finished articles!

I annoy Nicole some more

Nicole gets her revenge!

Anne also lead an activity, this time printing. She first demonstrated the activity, then helped the rest of the group get to grips with it.

Ta da!

And again, the volunteers had a go too!

Vicky's first up!

Almas and Sarah have a go too

And here's how they look when they're done!

You can see how the volunteers coped on the day itself by clicking here.

Bye for now!