Highlights from term one!

Clay critters yr 4/5

Chalky pastels yr 6

Watercolour paint yr 6

Fork paintings yr4/5

 

Colour mixing 'ink blot ' dragons yrs 1/2

Welcome to term 1 2017

We've been pretty busy in the art studio and have already learnt lots and are well on the way to creating some great artworks. 

Most classes have created artworks to cover their visual diaries (scrap books) Each class room have art works with a different focus to make it easy to sort the 450 scrap books stored in our art room. 

  Rooms 7,8 & 9 used crayon and a variety of lines to create a wax resist abstract art work.

Rooms 10,11,12 have used traced templates of shapes and lines and watercolour paint to create artworks using warm and cool colours.

Rooms 13 & 14 have made art works using large bubble numbers of their class number and divided the page into segments. To make the number stand out the children have painted the number with either warm or cool colours and the opposite for the background.

Rooms 1,19,20,24 & 25 have learnt about colour values and created a value scale using one colour and black and white.

 Room 1 & 2 have created a colour web using primary, secondary and tertiary colours and shades and tints of these colours. These were quite complicated and took a bit longer than intended. The children found it a little trickier than they expected creating shades and tints of each colour. They also found out how important it is to keep their mixing water and brushes clean! 

 

Free choice Christmas activities

This week the kids will be bringing home their art room scissors, pencils etc and their visual diaries ( scrap books) some classes have not used the whole book, other children love to make a lot of planning drawings so they may have completely filled their books. I've given them a holiday drawing 'challenge' with a selection of ideas to keep them in the habit of drawing over the break and so they can fill their visual diary with daily (or almost daily ) drawings! 

Being the end of the year the kids have been doing a variety of quick simple activities that can be completed in one lesson. Some of them are Christmas themed, some are not, however even the Christmassy ones can be adapted for those children who don't do Christmas activities for whatever reason - or if they've just had Christmas overload. ;)

So the holidays are nearly upon us! If you are looking for ideas to entertain your kids please consider taking your kids to one of our local galleries or take a train into Perth and visit the cultural centre, with the Art Gallery of WA and PICA within easy walking distance of the central train station. AGWA and PICA both run holiday workshops for kids - check out AGWA's website as they sometimes have free kids activities to go with their exhibitions. Fremantle Art Centre runs kids holiday workshops and often have interesting free exhibitions and now have a kids activity space that is linked to the exhibition they are running. 

Whatever you do this holiday I hope you have a safe and enjoyable break. 

Merry Christmas and happy new year! 

Miss Knight.

 

A rewarding day!

At our school we have a reward system called 'Above and Beyond' where kids are rewarded for doing exactly that both with their behaviour and for achieving goals. Throughout the year as kids receive award certificates they also get to attend certificate events. This term we had a an art focused reward. 

I organised to have Art on the Move come into the school and the kids got to meet artist Miik Green who told them about his work and led them through some art activities where they could experiment like he does to create some of their own art works.

It was a lot of fun!  

 

More wild things from the kiln

Opened the kiln again today and here are a few more of the yr3/4 & yr 4 ceramics.

 

Lions, tigers and bears!

Because I have been doing writing along with my art lessons I've been looking for ways to combine both. I thought this art work was a perfect way to inspire writing, developing ideas and sequencing events.

Traumgarten - Henri Rousseau 

First of all we discussed the art work using the VTS strategy. This strategy encourages children to make inferences and back them up with evidence in the art work. It also highlights that people have differing opinions and that is ok. We thought that maybe the man in this painting played his ukulele to tame the tiger so that he could get on his back. ( Don't worry - we know that art isn't always real, it's a bit like magic an artist can make anything happen! 😉) 

Yr 3

 Once we discussed the art work I had them imagine that they could tame an animal that lives in jungle or forest .... or the bush ( some kids really really wanted to tame an animal from Australia! So I had to acquiesce!

Yr 1

 They had to come up with an explanation for why they were in the jungle and how they managed to tame their wild animal. 

Yr 3

Once they had their ideas they made drawings of themselves on their animal, including any special thing they may have used to tame their animal. Once this was done some of the classes wrote the beginning of their story. 

Yr 1

 The next step was to look closely at the shapes of the jungle plants Henri Rousseau used and then use these ideas to draw their jungle around their drawings, filling the page.

Pre primary

 At this stage those classes doing writing continued to write their stories, having adventures in the jungle with their animal making sure that at the end of the story everything was wrapped up, making sure the reader was satisfied and had no questions at the end.

 Yr 2

Last of all we painted the drawings using watercolour techniques. 

Yr 3

 

A changed land

Last week our two yr 5 classes went in an art and history excursion to the Art Gallery of Western Australia. We saw an exhibition called 'Unknown' Land. It had drawings and paintings of Perth, Fremantle and other parts of WA from the time of early settlement. 

We were able to see how places had changed over time. We also spent some time drawing the urban environment around the gallery in the cultural centre. We also thought about the title of the exhibition and discussed the fact that it was unknown to the colonists but it was in fact very well known to the aboriginal people who already lived here.

This week in the art room we have drawn and painted landscape pictures of some of our favourite landmarks locally or somewhere in WA. We used the iPads to research photos of our favourite places and sketched ideas in our visual diaries before making our drawings.

Next we will be thinking about how things have changed over the last 200 years and use our history knowledge to predict how this landmark might change over the next 200 years. We have talked about areas being built up as populations grow but also how people are interested in conserving the environment and sustainability. So will their houses and buildings have solar panels or rooftop gardens in the future? 

We will use these ideas to create another landscape painting showing the same spot as we imagine it will be in the future.