Leaf batiks

When we had added about 4 layers of paint to our leaf batiks Mrs Graham painted on the Indian ink. Everything went black. We didn't do it ourselves because it is permanent ink. When the ink was dry we washed it off. This is what happened.

Well done to Justus for filming.

Leaf batik

As part of our forest topic we are making batik pictures of different leaves.

Art and D&T Week

Last week was Art and D&T Week in Primary. We did lots of exciting things, including making circus collages, using oil pastels on acitate, planning story boxes for our Traction Man work, meeting a professional artist and sculpting clay animals.

Here are some photos showing our work with the oil pastels:

This is Sophie Bacquié.

She is a local artist. She spent the day with us and showed us some famous animal-themed artworks that she finds interesting. Also, we looked at some of her paintings. Then she helped us make our own artwork using ink and pens. Here are some examples.

This is one of Sophie's paintings.

 



Circus face paints

Our new IPC topic is called 'The Circus is Coming to Town". As the entry point we watched some performances by 'Le Cirque de Soleil'. We read some books about the circus including non-fiction books and 

We looked at pictures of clowns and tried to 'read' their expressions. Working out whether they were happy, sad, puzzled, surprised... We will be painting each other's faces with clown make-up next week, so we each made a plan for our partner to work from.

Native American Cinderella and our dreamcatchers

We shared some Native American stories, including a version of Cinderella called 'The Rough-faced Girl'. Both the story and the pictures were really different to the other versions we had read.  

We watched a short video of a storyteller sharing a traditional Native American tale. You can watch it here.

We learnt about the importance of dreamcatchers in Native American culture. They believe that if the dreamcatcher is hung over the bed the good dreams will be caught and will slide down the strings and feathers to the sleeper. Meanwhile the bad dreams get caught and held in the net and disappear with the light of day.

We made our own dreamcatchers. 

Light and Dark art

At the end of our topic 'Light and Dark' we finished with an art lesson where we drew in the dark - well, semi-darkness because we did have torches. Here are some pictures of us drawing still-life pictures. We are trying to show which areas are lit up by the torch beam and which parts of the object are in the shadow. It was a real challenge!

Hundertwasser

In our art lessons we looked at paintings of buildings by the Austrian artist and architect, Friedensreich Hundertwasser. His pictures of brightly coloured buildings inspired us to create own artwork. We made some sketches then created our final piece on the computer using the program Paint.

Sketching the school

We have been looking closely at our school building. We went for a walk around the whole campus, including the Secondary school. Some children were surprised by how BIG our school is. We took photos of the parts of the building we found interesting and then we did some sketches. Some of us tried to use view-finders to focus on the area that we were sketching.
Look at our photos. Do you think our school is old or modern? How can you tell? What materials can you see? What do you like about our school building? If you could work with an architect to improve our school building what would you add/change?

Pants

In class we read 'Pants' by Giles Andre and Nick Sharratt. Their funny book inspired us to design our own pants. Which ones would you wear?

We Are Wild Things

African Masks

As part of our cooperation project with Le Ferradou school (our French partner) we will be working on performing a play together. It will be in French but the story is very international because the main character explores 5 different continents. Even though our performance is a long way off we are already preparing. Our first job was to find out about African masks. We learnt that they are traditionally worn for celebrations. Sometimes they are worn when performing dances. We looked at lots of examples before designing our own. Most African masks are made by carving wood but we will be using cardboard to make our masks. It is easier to cut and the masks will be lighter to wear!