Week Two - Westfield Tie Dye

Tie Dye in schools is by far one of the simplest things to do with the children, if you know what you’re doing! When deciding to set aside a full day session for different styles of tie dye I had a worry that the children might become easily bored of tying fabrics and had planned a second activity of continuing with pattern work on the seahorse heads in case this became a big issue; but i was pleasantly surprised that it went down extremely well with only a couple hiccups.

Tie Dye is a great way to create different pattern work on a piece of fabric or garment and when showing the children the t-shirts and fins they all get extremely excited (possibly because they all said it looked like a superhero cape - the main thing is they were excited!)

Time management was a key factor to this day, giving enough time for the dyes to set and then be washed as well as finding activities to do when the t-shirts were dying. Luckily the time plan ran extremely smoothly, tying t-shirts, dyeing them, tying the fins while the other dye was working, washing them and revealing them.

My main problem with this day was I had planned to tie the t-shirts with elastic bands, which worked fine with the children no great problems there. However i wanted to show them string can be used too so I planned to use this on the fins... only 4 of the children could tie knots. This meant we had to add an extra activity to the day which was "how to tie a knot", luckily the children picked this up relatively quickly and we were able to continue with or day.

Those children who had finished early helped other children who were finding it a little bit more difficult and once everyone had finished we had the extra activity to continue with.

Health and safety is known to be one of the most boring things - even I got a bit bored when i done my health and safety at uni, so i thought we should make this a little more fun, all though none of the children will be mixing the dyes there is no reason they can all wear aprons and gloves. This meant we could have discussions like "Why would it be sensible to wear gloves when working with a fabric dye" and "what is the purpose of the apron". this proved to be a great way of keeping the children involved in the preparation of the dyes and well as them learning the health and safety behind dye work.

T-shirts out to dry after being taken home for an extra wash.