Creative Schools is a flagship initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme to enable the creative potential of every child. Creative Schools is led by the Arts Council in partnership with the Department of Education and Skills and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

Two Mile House NS has been part of the Creative Schools initiative since it began in September 2018. The Creative Schools initiative aims to put the arts and creativity at the heart of children and young people’s lives. It gives students opportunities to access creativity on their own terms, outside of the parameters of regular curricular learning and teaching.

Creativity and the arts are central to our school and permeate all aspects of our learning & teaching. Our Creative Schools programme has seen us embed creativity further into our school practices through creative workshops, such as felting workshops with local artist Marta Golubowska. We were fortunate to be invited to the National Gallery to the Creative School’s showcase where children in 6^th class demonstrated their creative projects to other schools in 19/20.

We remain excited by the creativity generated by this project and look forward to seeing further expressions of this across all classes in Two Mile House NS.

Creative Schools Mosaic Project

 5^th and 6^th class pupils in 2020/2021 worked with Mosaic artist Aidan Byrne from Co. Offaly. Through the medium of Zoom and with lots of help from their teachers and SNAs, our pupils are creating beautiful works of art from their own wonderful imaginations.

5^th class created mosaic tiles using their own design and painstakingly 🙂 placed each little mosaic piece onto their tile to create a fantastic work of art.

6^th class created 2 large mosaic murals, based on all their own designs around the theme of their own school and local area. These murals were framed and installed in our school hall by Aidan, and will be viewed for years to come by the pupils that pass through our school. They will be part of the legacy that our 6^th class leave behind!

You can learn more about Aidan and his work on www.makemosaic.ie

Mosaic Tile Art  

By Selena Bontes-Naughton

Mosaic tile art is a picture or pattern made out of many small tiles. There are two different type of tiles you can use when making a mosaic art piece. First there is pixel mosaic, which are tiny squares of even size, normally used by beginners as they are easier to glue down and create a picture. Then there are variety shapes, such as tear drops, petals, circles, triangles, ovals and many more. Variety shapes are very  different to pixel pieces as they are all different sizes and shapes.

In school, our fifth and sixth classes both got to try mosaic tile art with Aidan.

We each got a small tile to decorate with tiny coloured ceramic pieces. The process included picking either pixel or variety shapes. If you picked pixel shapes then you had to draw out a grid, and make the picture by colouring in the squares. When you finished that, you then had to count out how   many pixel squares you needed. When you got your pixel squares you would get some  glue, squeeze it out in a line and place each square  neatly in place. 

If you did the variety shapes then you had to work on your design and when you were happy with your design, you would take individual pieces and glue them at the back. Then you are finished with the gluing.

With both types of tiles, you must grout them at the end, when they are dry, to fill in the gaps in between the tiles and make them look even better. The classes really enjoyed the art lessons with Aidan and made many beautiful art works.