I had missed the first day of classes, which the other mural teacher was able to cover, because of the flight delay from Rwanda to Nairobi, but from Sunday until Tuesday I was the mural teacher with 4 different classes of children. Each day the children attended classes from 9-12:30, after they had eaten breakfast, had assembly, and devotions in the morning.
Then breakfast, and assembly, where we discussed the theme of love, sung songs about love, and discussed topics surrounding love. The children were even divided into groups during camp, each having a group leader and named a certain aspect of love (such as selfless, humility, hopefulness).
During the afternoons after lunch, the children were taken to the ocean or Haller Wildlife Park, then return, showe, dinner, and movies and talent show in the evenings! During my classroom time with the children in the morning, I taught kids ages 7 to 18, and since our theme was Love we looked at 4 heroes whose lives reflected love. These four included Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Wangari Maathai, and Salim (an eight year old boy who passed away earlier this year.
Each class of children was educated about one of the Love Heroes during the week; we talked about their life, read about them, and finally each child participated in drawing a portrait of the hero.
For the drawing process, during the first day we passed out 2 different shades of pencil and a worksheet which helped the children understand what an HB pencil is verses a B5 pencil. We went over shading exercises and then I passed out a small square which was a portion of our portrait;so that they could practice shading what they saw in the box.
We discussed value, types of shading, and types of pencils on the first day and the children did a rough draft of their little square piece of the portrait. The second day each child was given their square back again and this time they did the final copy. With an eight inch by eight inch square the children carefully drew what they saw on their small square. Once collected, I laminated each square and fit each square in place, just like a puzzle, in order to create a 20- square mural! 2 are still in the process, but 2 are finished so far and the kids have something to be proud of.
